Rene Descartes Quotes

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I will, that I have sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am - of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain - or the mutual relations that obtain between all these things ... I have no idea whatever of my soul.

How can a man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer outer shell.

I'm not always what I think I am, but I am what I think.

We both exist and know that we exist, and rejoice in this knowledge.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find.

I know who I am. When I look in the mirror, I see me.

People seem to know more about me than I do.

To every man in the world there is one person of whom he knows little: whom he would never recognize if he met him walking down the street, whose motives are a mystery to him. That is himself.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

The only thing a man knows is himself.

When I look for my existence I do not look for it in myself.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

For however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable I.

Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

I consider my selfbeing ... that taste of myself, of I and me above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man.

A conscious mind is a mind with a self in it.

To know yourself you have only to set down a true statement of those that ever loved or hated you.

Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.