If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.
Cogito ergo sum. (I think; therefore I am.)
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.
The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until I knew it as such without a single doubt.
One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.
It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.