“I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen”

Source: The Principles of Philosophy

Last update Jan. 28, 2026. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto 'to live well you must live unseen" by René Descartes?

René Descartes47

French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist 1596–1650

Related quotes

“How should I behave in the place where I live? Have the mentality of an exile in the place where you live, do not desire to be listened to and you will have peace.”

Poemen (340–450) Egyptian monk and desert father

Source: Saying 191

“The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in.”

Gaston Bachelard book The Poetics of Space

La poétique de l'espace (The Poetics of Space) (1958)

“What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. “I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.””

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

Source: The Power of Now (1997) Introduction

“I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Capricorn

Source: Tropic of Capricorn

“Women qua women may remain, for the better continuance of life, subject to men; women as human beings demand to live as well as to continue life. To live effectively they must learn to know the world through and through, in order that, while side by side with men, they may fashion life to their common good.”

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) British classical scholar, linguist and feminist

"Homo Sum." Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist, 1900, p. 30 https://archive.org/details/homosumbeinglett00harruoft/page/30

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Attributed to Emerson in Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000) by H. Jackson Brown Jr., as well as numerous on-line sources since, the article "The Purpose of Life Is Not To Be Happy But To Matter" at the Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/29/purpose/ indicates that this quote is probably derived from various statements first made by Leo Rosten, including the following words delivered at the National Book Awards held in New York in 1962: "The purpose of life is not to be happy — but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all." <br class="br">Misattributed