René Descartes quotes - page 3
Mr. Clerselier has written me that you are expecting from him my Meditations... in order to present them to the queen of the land. ...If I had only been as wise as they say the savages persuaded themselves that the monkeys were, I never would have become known as a maker of books: Since it is said that they imagined that the monkeys could indeed speak, if they wanted to, but that they chose not to so lest they be forced to work. And since I had not the same prudence to abstain from writing, I now have neither as much liesure nor as much peace as I would have had if I had kept quiet. But since the mistake has already been made, and since I am now known by an infinity of people at the academy, who look askance at my writings and scour them for means of harming me, I do have great hope of being known to persons of great merit, whose power and virtue could protect me.
René Descartes
If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed.
René Descartes
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess.
René Descartes
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.
René Descartes
The great invention... Descartes gave to the world, the analytical diagram, ...gives at a glance a graphical picture of the law governing a phenomenon, or of the correlation which exists between dependent events, or of the changes which a situation undergoes in the course of time. ...the invention of Descartes not only created the important discipline of analytic geometry, but it gave Newton, Leibnitz, Euler, and the Bernoullis that weapon for the lack of which Archimedes and later Fermat had to leave inarticulate their profound and far-reaching thoughts.
René Descartes
It should be remembered that it was Descartes who systematised our Mathematical notation. He used the letters at the end of the alphabet as variables, and those at the beginning as constants, and he brought into general use our present system of indices. He also introduced the method of indeterminate co-efficients for the solution of equations.
René Descartes