In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.
rené Descartesquotes
1596 - 1650
In a time when original thinking could get one burned at the stake, French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) persisted in his “hope for a revolution in science.” Considered the father of modern philosophy, Descartes also influenced the scientific revolution as he promoted research firmly rooted in observation and experiment. He is the inventor of analytic geometry, as well as methodological skepticism, and known for the quote, “I think, therefore I am.”
Raised by his maternal grandmother until age 8, Descartes then attended a Jesuit boarding school. In college he studied theology, medicine, mathematics and philosophy but earned a law degree. He joined the army and traveled the globe where he, as he later explained, studied the “book of the world” to find truth.
His treatise, Discourse on Method, was published in French instead of Latin to broaden its accessibility. While known for its ground-breaking philosophical views, it also reveals Descartes true goal: To help both men and women learn to think for themselves.
Descartes moved to the more tolerant Netherlands to find solitude as well as safety for his sometimes heretical thinking. In Meditations on First Philosophy, in Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul, Descartes offers two proofs for the existence of God. Descartes was unattached to the emotions of religion, but held that a belief in God was necessary to live a moral life. He believed if man wanted change rather than pray to God, he must to learn to change himself.
For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance.
To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
There is nothing more ancient than the truth.
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
Masked, I advance.
In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto ‘to live well you must live unseen.
To know what people really think, pay attention to what they do, rather than what they say.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.