Quotes by Rene Descartes

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He who loves the truth must at least once in his life doubt everything.

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All sciences are so interrelated that it is easier to study them all at once than one of them separately from the others. The musings of the sages can be reduced to a very small number of general rules.

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Wisdom means not only prudence in practical matters, but also a perfect knowledge of what man is capable of knowing.

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People with a strong or generous character do not change their mood according to personal prosperity or misfortune.

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The true greatness of the soul, which entitles man to self-respect, consists more in the awareness that there is nothing more rightfully his than that he disposes of his own desires.

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Of two human passions - love and hate - a greater inclination towards the extreme manifests precisely love. She is more fiery and, stronger and more durable. The more passionately love burns, the more merciless it is to all that stands in its way and threatens it, it gives hate freedom to act in more than one direction, and thereby frees it from slavery innumerable evils; that it was only love that gave birth to those seeds of evil from which eventually arose the fire set on Troy.

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Remarkable men consider that there is no greater evil than the cowardice of those who cannot bear misfortune strongly, and though they dislike vices, they do not dislike those who indulge in such vices, but only pity them.

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In philosophy, concerning which all admit that it is not yet sufficiently investigated by men, and may yet be enriched with many wonderful discoveries, there is no praise more worthy than that of being an innovator.

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Conversing with the writers of other ages is the same as traveling.

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Hope represents the tendency of the soul to convince itself that the desired will come true. And fear is the inclination of the soul that convinces itself that the desire will not come true.

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Don't wish for anything you can't achieve yourself; your ultimate achievement is freedom. She cannot make you beautiful, rich, respected, strong and happy in the eyes of the whole world, she can only make you free. It does not make you master of things, but master of yourself.

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There is no activity more fertile than self-knowledge.

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Reason is like a lens, with which you light the fire and which, although it gets hot, remains cold.

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Always aim to conquer yourself rather than fate and change your own desires rather than the order of the world. Shame is a form of sadness based on self-love that occurs out of fear of condemnation from others.

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Those who have the conscience and the sense of their own value do not fear that others are smarter more learned, more beautiful than them. In the same way they do not consider themselves much superior to those whom they, in turn, surpass, because it seems to them that all these are of very little importance compared with the good will for which they respect themselves, and which they suppose each to have man.

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Isolation should be sought in large cities.

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Although only stupid and ignorant people are not naturally capable of wonder, yet the capacity to wonder does not always go hand in hand with the degree of spiritual endowment.

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It is impossible to invent something so original and incredible that has not already been said by some philosopher.

"Life is the understanding of a holy spirit in yourself; a holy spirit which is put into some limits. The only clear and final truth is the truth of conscience."

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I can only learn the true opinion of men by paying more attention to what they believe than to what they speak; not only because, due to the corruption of our morals, there are few people who say everything they do, but because there are many who themselves do not know what they believe.

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By intuition I do not mean the changing testimony of the senses, or the deceitful judgment of the improperly associating imagination, but the apprehension of a clear and attentive mind so easy and definite that what we understand leaves no room for further doubt.

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So what am I? It's a thoughtful thing. What it means? Obviously doubting, understanding, asserting, denying, wanting, not wanting, but at the same time imagining and sensing things.

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Obviously, everything that I have accepted as completely true up until now came to me either from values ​​or through the mediation of the senses. However, I have sometimes caught them by cheating, and prudent prudence demands that we never completely trust those who have tricked us even once.

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Doubt is the beginning of wisdom.

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Reading every good book is like having a conversation with the greatest people of past centuries who wrote these works, a selected conversation, because they only share their best thoughts with us.

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What we call common sense or reason - is equal by nature in all men; so our opinions differ not because some are smarter than others, but because their thoughts follow different paths and we do not look at the same things. It is not enough for someone to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

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There is nothing more justly distributed among men than common sense; because everyone thinks he got it.

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I think, therefore I am.

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Science is about how the world is, and religion is about how the world should be.

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The greatest soul is as capable of the greatest sins as of the greatest virtues; and those who walk slowly, but always stay on the straight path, can reach much further than those who run and deviate from the straight path.

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I will only say this about philosophy: I have seen that for centuries the most excellent minds have dealt with it, and yet there is not a single thing in it that they do not argue about, that is therefore not in doubt.

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It is good if we know something about the customs of different peoples, so that we can then judge our own more clearly, and not think, like those who have never seen anything, that what is contrary to what is fashionable in our country is ridiculous and unreasonable.

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Philosophy provides a way for man to say that everything is probable, and to be admired by less scientists.

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Mathematics has extremely subtle ideas that can satisfy the curious, make crafts easier, and reduce people's work.

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The memorable deeds of history lift our spirits, and if we read them carefully, they cultivate our judgment.

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All we have in our power is our own thoughts.

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I managed (...) to be firm and determined in my actions as much as I could; once I have made up my mind about something, I follow even the most doubtful opinions as if they were the most certain. So does the traveler; if he is lost in the forest, he must not wander to and fro, turning to one direction and then to another; still less should he remain in one place; but he must always go as straight as possible in one direction, and this direction, although he may have chosen it by chance at first, must not leave it for any reason; even if he doesn't get where he wanted to go, he will eventually get somewhere where he'll probably have better things to do than in the woods.

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Those whose way of thinking is completely different from ours are not barbarians or savages, and they use their minds just as well or even better than us.

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The world consists almost exclusively of two (...) kinds of people (...); first, from those who think they are smarter than they are, and therefore judge hastily, and do not have enough patience to think regularly; these, if it once occurred to them to doubt the accepted principles and deviate from the ordinary path, could never remain on the path on which we can move forward more directly, and would wander lost throughout their lives; then of those who have sense and modesty enough to see that they are less capable of distinguishing truth from error than others from whom they may learn; even then they have to accept that they follow the opinions of these others rather than looking for better ones themselves.

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There is only one truth about everything, and whoever finds that one truth knows as much about the thing as there is to know about it at all.

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In matters of more difficult truths, the majority of words are worthless, because it is much more likely that one person has stumbled upon the truth than an entire people.

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Those who undertake to dispense instructions certainly think themselves smarter than those to whom they give instructions; if they then err in the smallest thing, they are worthy of rebuke.

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Even the judgments of our friends, if they are favorable to us, should be regarded with suspicion.

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If you travel a lot, you become a stranger in your own country.

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Those who are better at reasoning, and better at regurgitating their thoughts in order to express them clearly and intelligibly, are better able to convince people of what they claim, even if they speak in dirty language and have never studied rhetoric; and those who have kinder ideas and can express them more gracefully and tenderly will be better poets, even if they are unfamiliar with poetry.

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I carefully examined what I was; I saw that I could imagine that I had no body, that the world did not exist, that there was no space in which I was; but I cannot imagine myself not existing; on the contrary, from the fact that I think that I doubt the truth of all things, it follows, namely quite clearly and certainly, that I exist; on the other hand, as soon as I stopped thinking, then everything else that I imagined could be true, but I would not be able to believe that I exist; from this I saw that I am a substance whose whole essence or quality consists in thinking, and whose existence does not depend on any place in space or on any material thing, in so far as it is me, that is, the soul by which I am, what I am is something completely different from the body, even easier to know than it is, and even then it would be exactly what it is if this body did not exist.

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There is no strange and impossible thing that we can think of that some philosopher has not already said.

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We must guard against overestimating our own importance.

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My main wish has always been to learn to distinguish truth from error, so that I can clearly see how I should act and move forward safely in this life.

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Feelings are also sensual disappointments.

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I will always be much more obliged to those whose good will will allow me to enjoy my free time unhindered than to those who would offer me the most honorable offices on Earth.

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Those who slowly ground the truth in the sciences walk almost like those who are beginning to get rich: they acquire much with much less effort than with which they acquired much less before, when they were still poor.

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However true it may be that every man has a duty, as much as he can, to contribute to the well-being of others, and that he who is of no use to anyone is worthless; yet it is just as true that our concerns must extend beyond the present, and it is right to stop doing something that would benefit the living to some extent, but which we abandon in order to do something that will benefit our grandchildren much more.

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The further we advance in knowledge, the more necessary experiments are.

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Our will desires or avoids something only insofar as our understanding presents it as good or bad; therefore, if we think rightly, we can also act rightly; if we think as correctly as possible, we can act as correctly as possible.

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Seeing that many things that seem impossible and ridiculous to us find familiarity and commonplace among other peoples, I am used to not firmly believing in anything that only example and custom convinces me of.

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I find much more truth in the reasonings of people about their own affairs, which are important to them, in which the error very quickly avenges itself, than in those which a certain scientist spends in his study, thinking about things that have no concept, and which, in my opinion, have at most the same result they walk, that the further they fall from common sense, the more reason they give him reason for vanity, because the more reason and skill was required to make them plausible.

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Looking at the various actions and undertakings of men with the eyes of a philosopher, I hardly found one that I did not consider useless and futile.