224 Quotes by Rene Descartes

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.

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

All is to be doubted.

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.

There is a little gland in the brain in which the soul exercises its functions in a more particular way than in the other parts.

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

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.

Be that as it may, there is fixed in my mind a certain opinion of long [21] standing, namely that there exists a God who is able to do anything and by whom I, such as I am, have been created. How do I know that he did not bring it about that there is no earth at all, no heavens, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, and yet bringing it about that all these things appear to me to exist precisely as they do now?

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.