Rene Descartes Quotes

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
-Rene Descartes

Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
-Rene Descartes

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.
-Rene Descartes

Everything is self-evident.
-Rene Descartes

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
-Rene Descartes

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
-Rene Descartes

I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.
-Rene Descartes

I think; therefore I am.
-Rene Descartes

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
-Rene Descartes

Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
-Rene Descartes

In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
-Rene Descartes

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
-Rene Descartes

It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
-Rene Descartes

The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
-Rene Descartes

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
-Rene Descartes

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
-Rene Descartes

The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once.
-Rene Descartes

The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
-Rene Descartes

There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another.
-Rene Descartes

When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
-Rene Descartes

Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
-Rene Descartes

You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
-Rene Descartes