Every man is indeed bound to do what he can to promote the good of others, and a man who is of no use to anyone is strictly worthless.
Rene DescartesThe two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.
Rene DescartesThe 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 DescartesSome years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.
Rene Descartes