Рене Декарт: Цитаты на английском языке (страница 2)

“To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.”

“You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.”

“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.”

“For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance”

“He who hid well, lived well.”

“Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems”

“At last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.”

“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.”

“Because reason… is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us…”

“With me, everything turns into mathematics.”

“Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.”

“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.”

“Bad books engender bad habits, but bad habits engender good books.”

“It is best not to go on for great quest for truth, it will only make you miserable”

“I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.”

“I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.”
Cogito, ergo sum.

“No doubt you know that Galileo had been convicted not long ago by the Inquisition, and that his opinion on the movement of the Earth had been condemned as heresy. Now I will tell you that all things I explain in my treatise, among which is also that same opinion about the movement of the Earth, all depend on one another, and are based upon certain evident truths. Nevertheless, I will not for the world stand up against the authority of the Church. …I have the desire to live in peace and to continue on the road on which I have started.”

“Thus, all unknown quantities can be expressed in terms of a single quantity, whenever the problem can be constructed by means of circles and straight lines, or by conic sections, or even by some other curve of degree not greater than the third or fourth.
But I shall not stop to explain this in more detail, because I should deprive you of the pleasure of mastering it yourself, as well as of the advantage of training your mind by working over it, which is in my opinion the principal benefit to be derived from this science. Because, I find nothing here so difficult that it cannot be worked out by anyone at all familiar with ordinary geometry and with algebra, who will consider carefully all that is set forth in this treatise.”

“Staying as I am, one foot in one country and the other in another, I find my condition very happy, in that it is free.”