Q0056

René Descartes

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

The things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true.
Thinker René Descartes
School Modern Rationalism
Source Discourse on the Method IV
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Discourse on the Method IV, within the tradition of Modern Rationalism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In René Descartes's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: René Descartes. (n.d.). The things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0056

MLA: René Descartes. “The things we conceive very clearly and very….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0056.

Chicago: René Descartes. “The things we conceive very clearly and very….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0056.

Same thinker

More from René Descartes

  1. I think, therefore I am.
  2. Once in a lifetime, everything must be doubted.
  3. Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world.
  4. I am, I exist—whenever it is uttered by me, or conceived in the mind, it is necessarily true.
  5. to change my desires rather than the order of the world

All quotations by René Descartes

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme