An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?
– Rene Descartes
At the time, my grandparents told my mom, Lordy, what is Shannen doing? Now I've calmed down.
– Rene Descartes
Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have.
– Rene Descartes
Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.
– 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
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
It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
– 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
Cogito ergo sum. (I think; therefore I am.)
– Rene Descartes
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
– Rene Descartes
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
– Rene Descartes
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.
– Rene Descartes
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
– 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 two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
– 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
Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.
– Rene Descartes
I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.
– Rene Descartes
I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.