A Person Has Two Passions

For I Found Myself Embarrassed With So Many Doubts And Errors That It Seemed To Me That The Effort To Instruct Myself Had No Effect Other Than Th Eincreasing Discovery Of My Own Ignorance

Some Years Ago I Was Struck By The Large Number Of Falsehoods That I Had Accepted As True In My Childhood, And By The Highly Doubtful Nature Of The Whole Edifice That I Had Subsequently Based On Them. I Realized That It Was Necessary, Once In The Course Of My Life, To Demolish Everything Completely And Start Again Right From The Foundations If I Wanted To Establish Anything At All In The Sciences That Was Stable And Likely To Last.

Illusory Joy Is Often Worth More Than Genuine Sorrow.

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.

Common Sense Is The Best Distributed Thing In The World, For We All Think We Possess A Good Share Of It.