Status Updates From Discourse on Method and Med...

I will explain in detail in the ensuing remarks how, from the mere fact that there is within mean idea of something more perfect than me, it follows that this thing really exists. (Preface to the Reader, pp. 51-52)

Proving that God exists and that the mind is distinct from the body have been brought (as I am confident they can be) to such a level of lucidity that these arguments out to be regarded as the most precise of demonstrations.… by all who are discerning.… (from Letter of Dedication to the Meditations on First Philosophy, pp.49-50)

They [obscure philosophers] seem to me like a blind man who, in order to fight without a disadvantage against someone who is sighted, had made his opponent go into the depths of some very dark cellar… I would, by publishing… [my principles… as … simple & … evident as they are] be doing almost the same as if I were to open some windows & make some daylight enter that cellar they had gone into in order to fight. (p. 40

It is certain… that the action by which God preserves the world is precisely the same as that by which he created it. (p. 25)

If there still are men who have not been sufficiently persuaded of the existence of God and of their soul by means of the reasons I have brought forward, I very much want them to know that all the other things of which they think themselves perhaps more assured, such as having a body, that there are stars and an earth, and the like, are less certain. (p. 21)

Nothing was in their power but their thoughts. (p. 15)

I imagined that people who, having once been half savages and having been civilized little by little, have made their laws only to the extent that the inconvenience due to crimes and quarrels have forced them to do so, could not be as well ordered as those who, from the very beginning of their coming together, have followed the fundamental precepts of some prudent legislator. (p. 7)

"The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the most honorable people of past ages, who were their authors, indeed, even like a set conversation in which they reveal to us only the best of their thoughts." (p. 3)

Meditation one and two.

Hmm