Top 100 Quotes About Descartes
#1. So far, I have been a spectator in this theatre which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.
Rene Descartes
#2. Descartes, the Frenchman, had little trouble knowing that he existed.
N.D. Wilson
#3. The will determines itself; it should not be described as blind, any more than vision should be described as deaf.
Rene Descartes
#4. Let there be an end to thought. Thus do I refute Descartes.' I sprawled, not a cogito or a sum to my name.
Roger Zelazny
#5. I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.
Rene Descartes
#6. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#7. You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
Rene Descartes
#8. Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Rene Descartes
#9. Intuition is the undoubting conception of a pure and attentive mind, which arises from the light of reason alone, and is more certain than deduction.
Rene Descartes
#10. Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
Rene Descartes
#11. It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.
Tim Parks
#12. 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 the increasing discovery of my own ignorance
Rene Descartes
#13. My laps-meter, the first caliper of the soul and the first hope of bridging the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house.
Walker Percy
#14. It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.
Rene Descartes
#15. Every man is indeed bound to do what he can to promote the good of others, and a man who is of no use to anyone is strictly worthless.
Rene Descartes
#17. I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
Rene Descartes
#18. And I shall always hold myself more obliged to those by whose favour I enjoy uninterrupted leisure than to any who might offer me the most honourable positions in the world.
Rene Descartes
#19. I am thing that thinks: that is, a things that doubts,affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions.
Rene Descartes
#20. Human wisdom remains always one and the same although applied to the most diverse objects and it is no more changed by their diversity than the sunshine is changed by the variety of objects which it illuminates.
Rene Descartes
#21. Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have.
Rene Descartes
#22. It is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
Rene Descartes
#23. The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.
Rene Descartes
#24. In the matter of a difficult question it is more likely that the truth should have been discovered by the few than by the many.
Rene Descartes
#25. Instead I ought to be grateful to Him who never owed me anything for having been so generous to me, rather than think that He deprived me of those things or has taken away from me whatever He did not give me.
Rene Descartes
#26. Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible will always be best able to persuade others of what they say, even if they speak in the thickest of dialects
Rene Descartes
#29. He passed the lighter down the table until Descartes held it in one hand while setting the greasy cylinder down on the table. After smoothing it out, Descartes sparked up the lighter. With the lighter drawn near the grease, the aroma of burnt hair filled the board room.
Dylan Callens
#30. At last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.
Rene Descartes
#31. It is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.
Rene Descartes
#32. R5 Passive Knower: "If, whenever I have to make a judgement, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong" (Descartes, PWD 2:43).
Lee Braver
#33. So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there.
Rene Descartes
#34. When I turn my mind's eye upon myself, I understand that I am a thing which is incomplete and dependent on another and which aspires without limit to ever greater and better things ...
Rene Descartes
#35. It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.
Paul C. Vitz
#36. To know what people really think, pay attention to what they do, rather than what they say.
Rene Descartes
#37. If I find some reason for doubt in each of my beliefs, that will be enough to reject all of them.
Rene Descartes
#38. The very desire to seek the truth often causes people, who do not know how it should be sought correctly, to make judgements about things that they do not perceive and in that way they make mistakes.
Rene Descartes
#39. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think.
G.K. Chesterton
#40. As we appreciate our feelings, we naturally build on Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am,' to realize 'I feel, therefore I am more than I think.
Deborah Sandella
#41. The dreams we imagine when we are asleep should not in any way make us doubt the truth of the thoughts we have when we are awake.
Rene Descartes
#42. Because reason ... is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us ...
Rene Descartes
#43. And, in fine, of false sciences I thought I knew the worth sufficiently to escape being deceived by the professions of an alchemist, the predictions of an astrologer, the impostures of a magician, or by the artifices and boasting of any of those who profess to know things of which they are ignorant.
Rene Descartes
#44. Although my knowledge grows more and more, nevertheless I do not for that reason believe that it can ever be actually infinite, since it can never reach a point so high that it will be unable to attain any greater increase.
Rene Descartes
#45. There is a little gland in the brain in which the soul exercises its functions in a more particular way than in the other parts.
Rene Descartes
#46. Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven.
Ken Follett
#47. After loss of Identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality, or, as Descartes didn't say, "I fuck therefore I am".
Jeanette Winterson
#49. It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.
Rene Descartes
#50. It is just as valuable to be censured by friends as it is splendid to be praised by enemies. We desire praise from those who do not know us, but from friends we want the truth.
Rene Descartes
#51. Hence reason also demands that, since our thoughts cannot all be true because we are not wholly perfect, what truth they do possess must inevitably be found in the thoughts we have when awake, rather than in our dreams.
Rene Descartes
#52. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.
Steven Pinker
#55. [I]t seems to be just as foolish to say, 'I imagine, in order to understand more clearly what I am,' as to say, 'I am now clearly awake and I see something true, but because I do not yet see it clearly enough I shall fall asleep so that my dreams will represent it to me more truly and clearly.
Rene Descartes
#57. Those who move but very slowly, may advance much farther, if they always follow the right way; then those who run and straggle from it.
Rene Descartes
#58. Descartes gave sight to the blind. These saw the errors of antiquity and of the sciences. The path he struck out is since become boundless [ ... ] In fathoming this abyss no bottom has been found. We are now to examine what discoveries Sir Isaac Newton has made in it.
Voltaire
#59. To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.
Rene Descartes
#60. One should never judge anything unless it is known.
Rene Descartes
#62. For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.
Paul Engle
#63. Several years have now passed since I first realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them.
Rene Descartes
#64. I think. Therefore, I am. I think."
- Anonymous
I found this written in tiny letters in the grout between the wall tiles above a urinal in a restroom at the University of Washington, circa 1980. I don't know if Descartes would have approved but I thought it was brilliant.
Gary Val Tenuta
#65. If I found any new truths in the sciences, I can say that they follow from, or depend on, five or six principal problems which I succeeded in solving and which I regard as so many battles where the fortunes of war were on my side.
Rene Descartes
#66. I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.
Rene Descartes
#67. It is prudent never to trust those who have deceived us, even if only once.
Rene Descartes
#68. A long time ago, Descartes sad, "I think, therefore I am." But if you are not thinking, what?
Seungsahn
#69. It's the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: "I don't really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it."
Rene Descartes
#70. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it.
Rene Descartes
#71. How do we know that anything really exists, that anything is really the way it seems ot us through our senses?
Rene Descartes
#72. Archimedes, that he might transport the entire globe ... demanded only a point that was firm and immovable; so also, I shall be entitled to entertain the highest expectations, if I am fortunate enough to discover only one thing that is certain and indubitable.
Rene Descartes
#73. For how do we know that the thoughts which occur in dreaming are false rather than those others which we experience when awake, since the former are often not less vivid and distinct than the latter?
Rene Descartes
#74. In order to determine whether we can know anything with certainty, we first have to doubt everything we know. - Descartes
Lex Bayer
#75. In his mature works from Ideas I, notably the Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl presented his approach as a radicalization of Descartes' project that sought to return knowledge to a foundation in the certainty of subjective experience (cogito ergo sum).
Dermot Moran
#76. And it is evident that it is not less repugnant that falsity or imperfection, in so far as it is imperfection, should proceed from God, than that truth or perfection should proceed from nothing.
Rene Descartes
#77. The application of algebra to geometry ... has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.
John Stuart Mill
#78. I discover vision, not as a "thinking about seeing," to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#79. It's a philosophical minefield!
Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together.
Jonathan L. Howard
#80. Desire awakens only to things that are thought possible.
Rene Descartes
#81. Moreover, I am aware that most of the irreligious deny the existence of God, and the distinctness of the human soul from the body, for no other reason than because these points, as they allege, have never as yet been demonstrated.
Rene Descartes
#84. Thought I had said enough respecting them to show that there is nothing observable in the heavens or stars of our system that must not, or at least may not appear precisely alike in those of the system which I described.
Rene Descartes
#85. I think, therefore I am" vs. "As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.
Rene Descartes
#86. What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his bowels!
Benjamin Franklin
#87. The philosophical connection between the Islamic world and the West is much closer than I thought. Doubt did not begin with Descartes. We have this construction today that the West and Islam are entirely separate worlds. This is wrong.
Tariq Ramadan
#88. A person has two passions for love and abhorrence. A big disposition to excessiveness has just a love, because it is more ardent and stronger.
Rene Descartes
#89. So that there resulted a chaos as disordered as the poets ever feigned,
Rene Descartes
#90. It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.
Rene Descartes
#91. In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.
Rene Descartes
#92. I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.
Rene Descartes
#93. Descartes says: I think, and I am every moment I am thinking, because I have this inner awareness of myself. And I always thought there was something fishy about that. I don't think there's any privileged self-knowledge. Most of our attention is to things outside us.
Marjorie Grene
#94. Thereafter, I showed how the greatest part of the matter of this chaos must, in accordance with these laws, dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of heavens;
Rene Descartes
#95. There is nothing so far removed from us to be beyond our reach, or so far hidden that we cannot discover it.
Rene Descartes
#97. So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.
Hilary Kornblith
#98. The basis of all reasoning is the mind's awareness of itself. What we think, the external objects we perceive, are all like actors that come on and off stage. But our consciousness, the stage itself, is always present to us.
Trey Parker
#99. You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.
Richard Rorty
#100. Intuitive knowledge is an illumination of the soul, whereby it beholds in the light of God those things which it pleases Him to reveal to us by a direct impression of divine clearness.
Rene Descartes
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