René Descartes - True Quotes

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Even the mind depends so much on temperament and the disposition of one's bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a way to make people generally more wise and more skilful than they have been in the past, I believe that we should look for it in medicine. It is true that medicine as it is currently practiced contains little of much use.

René Descartes
What is there, then, that can be esteemed true? Perhaps this only, that there is absolutely nothing certain.

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

René Descartes
Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am—I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be. I now admit nothing that is not necessarily true: I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind, understanding, or reason,—terms whose signification was before unknown to me.

René Descartes
I concluded that I might take as a general rule the principle that all things which we very clearly and obviously conceive are true: only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive.

René Descartes
I can establish as a general rule that all things which I perceive very clearly and distinctly are true.

René Descartes
No more useful inquiry can be proposed than that which seeks to determine the nature and the scope of human knowledge.... This investigation should be undertaken once at least in his life by anyone who has the slightest regard for truth, since in pursuing it the true instruments of knowledge and the whole method of inquiry come to light. But nothing seems to me more futile than the conduct of those who boldly dispute about the secrets of nature... without yet having ever asked even whether human reason is adequate to the solution of these problems.

René Descartes
The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another.

René Descartes
But there is I know not what being, who is possessed at once of the highest power and the deepest cunning, who is constantly employing all his ingenuity in deceiving me. Doubtless, then, I exist, since I am deceived; and, let him deceive me as he may, he can never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I shall be conscious that I am something. So that... this proposition I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time it is expressed by me, or conceived in my mind.

René Descartes
When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to act accordingly to what is most probable.

René Descartes