Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me.

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.

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the self-same well from which your laughter rises was often-times filled with your tears.

Even if I were to suppose that I was dreaming and whatever I saw or imagined was false, yet I could not deny that ideas were truly in my mind.

Nothing comes out of nothing.

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

Thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.