"For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it."
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Rene Descartes quotes (page 5 of 8)
156 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"... regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any machine. ... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act."
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"Intuition is the undoubting conception of a pure and attentive mind, which arises from the light of reason alone, and is more certain than deduction."
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"Neither the true nor the false roots are always real; sometimes they are imaginary; that is, while we can always imagine as many roots for each equation as I have assigned, yet there is not always a definite quantity corresponding to each root we have imagined."
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"This result could have been achieved either by his [God] endowing my intellect with a clear and distinct perception of everything about which I would ever deliberate, or simply by impressing the following rule so firmly upon my memory that I could never forget it: I should never judge anything that I do not clearly and distinctly understand."
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"With me, everything turns into mathematics."
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"The mind effortlessly and automatically takes in new ideas, which remain in limbo until verified or rejected by conscious, rational analysis."
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"Human wisdom remains always one and the same although applied to the most diverse objects and it is no more changed by their diversity than the sunshine is changed by the variety of objects which it illuminates."
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"As I considered the matter carefully it gradually came to light that all those matters only were referred to mathematics in which order and measurements are investigated, and that it makes no difference whether it be in numbers, figures, stars, sounds or any other object that the question of measurement arises. I saw consequently that there must be some general science to explain that element as a whole which gives rise to problems about order and measurement, restricted as these are to no special subject matter. This, I perceived was called 'universal mathematics'."
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"I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake."
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"I am thinking, therefore I exist. (...) I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is solely to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this 'I' - that is, the soul by which I am what I am - is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist."
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"Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something."
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"The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts."
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"Divide each difficulty at hand into as many pieces as possible and as could be required to better solve them."
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"The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt."
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"How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems ot us through our senses?"
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"Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears."
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"The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellencies, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it."
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"Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me."
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"I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath."
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