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
Without doubt one always looks more carefully at what one believes must be seen by many than at what one does only for oneself, and often the things that have seemed to me to be true when I began to concieve them have appeared false to me when I wanted to put them on paper. - Rene Descartes
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues. - 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
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
. . .to be useful to no one is, strictly speaking, to be worthless. - 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
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another. - Rene Descartes
I think; therefore I am. - Rene Descartes
I know not if I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or if I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. - Rene Descartes
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed: for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. - Rene Descartes