It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it."

These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered.

But possibly I am something more than I suppose myself to be.

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.

The only secure knowledge is that I exist.

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

Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.