The best phrases of Descartes
René Descartes (1596 - 1650 AD) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. He is considered the father of modern philosophy and one of the most prominent names of the scientific revolution.
He was born into a low-nobility family. Thirteen months after his birth, his mother died after giving birth to a new son who did not survive. He was raised by his grandmother, his father, and the nurse from whom he would never be separated.
His father called him “the little philosopher,” because from his early childhood he never stopped asking himself questions about everything. His teachers at school quickly recognized his intellectual talents and interest in mathematics and philosophy. After studying law and medicine at the University of Poitiers (France), he ended up moving to the Netherlands where he lived a modest and quiet life.
His most famous philosophical principle is "cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"), a fundamental element of Western rationalism. Descartes presents his philosophical and scientific method in his Rules for the Direction of Reason (1628) and, above all, in his famous Discourse on Method (1637), where, with great clarity and simplicity, he proposes four basic rules that contradict the scholasticism that taught In the universities of that time. His ideas represented a revolution in philosophy and theology, praised by some (such as Malebranche) and criticized by others (such as Spinoza or Leibniz).
Descartes died on February 11, 1650, at the age of 53, from pneumonia. But historian Eike Paes, in his book “The Murder of Descartes: Documents, Evidence, and Evidence,” concluded that his death was due to arsenic poisoning. He points to the priest François Viuge as being responsible for the crime, or at least the instigator of it.
Some of his most famous phrases:
“I would give everything I know for half of what I don't know.”
“Feeling is nothing but thinking.”
“I think and doubt, therefore I am.”
“It is difficult for anyone to say that there is no evidence against him.”
“Bad books cause bad habits and bad habits cause good books.”
“Two things contribute to moving forward: progressing faster than others, or being on the right path.”
"Never admit anything to be true without being aware of the evidence that it is so; that is, avoid haste and prohibition with great care, and admit in my judgments nothing more than which appears to me clear and distinct." He has no reason to doubt it."
“To live without philosophy is, in the proper sense, to have your eyes closed, without ever trying to open them.”
“Even false joy is usually better than real sadness.”
“There is nothing more just in the world than reason: everyone is convinced that they have enough.”
“To ascertain the truth, it is necessary to doubt, as much as possible, everything.”
"It is not enough to have good dexterity; the main thing is to apply it well."
“Reading good books is a conversation with the most brilliant men of past centuries.”
“I conduct my thoughts in order, beginning with the simplest and easiest to know, and then ascend little by little, and gradually, to the knowledge of the most complex, and even assume an order between them that does not naturally resemble one another.” Others.
“Philosophy is what distinguishes us from savages and barbarians; the more civilized and cultured a nation is, the better its men are at philosophy.”
“It often happens that there is not so much perfection in works composed of several pieces made by the hands of many artists as in those worked by one alone.”
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