Rene Descartes Quotes

Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

I am never satisfied until I can make a mathematical model of what I am studying. If I succeed in making one, I understand. If I cannot, I do not understand.

Since you got here by not thinking, it seems reasonable to expect that, in order to get out, you must start thinking.

In order to begin an analysis, there must already be a synthesis present in the mind.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

Reason is the miner's lamp used in bringing up ore from the mind.

Thinking. A process by which I use my brain to make a rational decision.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

Geometry is beautifully logical, and it teaches you how to think and prove that things are so, step by step by step. Proofs are excellent lessons in reasoning. Without logic and reasoning, you are dependent on jumping to conclusions or - worse - having empty opinions.

The investigation of mathematical truths accustoms the mind to method and correctness in reasoning, and is an employment peculiarly worthy of rational beings.

Always it is thus with my new students, and especially with the human ones; the mind is the last muscle they train or use, and the one that they regard the least. Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and... well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return.

Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It's like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning.

We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Order is the key to all problems.

I learned how to order my thoughts, and most important, learned how to develop a plan. I discovered the power of a plan. If you can plan it out, and it seems logical to you, you can do it. And that was the secret to success.

With method and logic one can accomplish anything.

A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.

Principle will, in... most... cases open the way for us to correct conclusion.

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.