Top 100 Quotes About Descartes
#1. Descartes, the Frenchman, had little trouble knowing that he existed.
N.D. Wilson
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. It indicates where the problem lies for Descartes. It lies in other people.
Paul C. Vitz
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven.
Ken Follett
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. A long time ago, Descartes sad, "I think, therefore I am." But if you are not thinking, what?
Seungsahn
#17. In order to determine whether we can know anything with certainty, we first have to doubt everything we know. - Descartes
Lex Bayer
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. What Comfort can the Vortices of Descartes give to a Man who has Whirlwinds in his bowels!
Benjamin Franklin
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself
Henry Adams
#28. Rene Descartes, in order to raise skeptical doubts about even our firmest certainties, imagined that we might he under the influence of an evil demon, and more modern philosophers have speculated about the possibility of our being brains in vats.
Victor Reppert
#29. Descartes was not interested in probabilities. He wanted absolute certainty. He had to be sure that indubitable knowledge, immune from skeptical attack, was possible.
Steven Nadler
#30. The term middle-aged, invented by Descartes, comes from the Latin, medeus, meaning 'not really old' and ageis, meaning 'if you look at it in a certain way.
Marilyn Suzanne Miller
#31. Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.
Eric Kandel
#32. Don't think too much. Descartes may come to existence when he thinks, but you perish and vanish when you think.
Oguz Atay
#33. CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, author of 'Cogito ergo sum' to demonstrate the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved 'Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum' 'I think that I think, therefore I think that I am' as close an approach.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.
Paul Tillich
#35. I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.
Blaise Pascal
#36. Antonio Damasio has written three books: Looking for Spinoza, Descartes' Error, and The Feeling of What Happens. These
Terry Pratchett
#37. In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
Italo Calvino
#38. What Descartes did not know: no such isolated individual as he described can be conscious.
Walker Percy
#39. Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains
in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#40. I'm also thinking a lot lately that Descartes has so much to answer for - his idea, "I think therefore I am." Western culture is so built around this overly cerebral disembodied way we've created all of our institutions, and we're impoverished by it. We're so much smaller for it. So
Krista Tippett
#41. Descartes was very interested in anatomy and physiology and regarded a tiny organ in the center of the brain, called the pineal gland, as the principal seat of the soul. That gland, he believed, was the place where all our thoughts are formed, the wellspring of our free will.
Anonymous
#42. It may be said that the conceptions of differential quotient and
integral, which in their origin certainly go back to Archimedes,
were introduced into science by the investigations of Kepler,
Descartes, Cavalieri, Fermat and Wallis ...
Sophus Lie
#43. Wow. I'm twenty years old. Rene Descartes invented analytic geometry in his early twenties. Talk about pressure.
Anna Kay Akana
#44. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." I say, "I do not think, that is why I exist."
Taisen Deshimaru
#45. Descartes' dictum: 'There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another.
Paul Johnson
#46. The computer-simulated dreamworld of the Matrix trilogy is a technological version of Descartes's evil demon. In essence it represents the idea of a mind (the Architect) more powerful than our own that is intent on deceiving us whenever, and however, it sees fit.
William Irwin
#48. I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.
Derrick Jensen
#49. Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
James Clerk Maxwell
#50. Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.
Tom Robbins
#51. Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes' clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness).
Lev Shestov
#52. When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.
Steven Kotler
#53. In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.
James Mark Baldwin
#54. The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or of the totality.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
#55. Descartes believed that idleness was essential to good mental work,
Mason Currey
#56. Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.
Flann O'Brien
#57. She imagines herself as the long-dead Descartes, staring into his fireplace and building a world in his own mind.
Scott Westerfeld
#58. For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes 's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
Zygmunt Bauman
#59. Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.
Rachel Caine
#60. I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal ... like all great astronomers mathematicians of the past.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
#61. Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.
Voltaire
#62. I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of
Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.
Blaise Pascal
#63. Descartes made mention of such views, and more generally saw the imagination as an important tool for managing the emotions: picturing things in the imagination could have affective results, so manipulating the imagination is an effective way of controlling our emotions and their effects.
Anonymous
#64. Descartes walks into a bar, and the bartender asks "Would you like a beer?" Descartes replies, "I think not" and poof! he vanishes.
Various
#66. I am not much for philosophy, but that old Descartes, he got me thinking. And therefore being. Anyone? Anyone? Cogito ergo sum jokes? No? Okay.
John Green
#67. That is why I don't believe much in what Mr. Descartes said: "I think, therefore I am."
I think, therefore I'm lost in my thinking. I'm not there.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#68. We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs. When Descartes said 'I think, therefore I am,' he had not discovered 'the most fundamental truth', Tolle insists; instead, he had given expression to 'the most basic error'.
Oliver Burkeman
#69. Bacon , Locke , Descartes , Hume , and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves.
Allan Bloom
#70. 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
#71. The will determines itself; it should not be described as blind, any more than vision should be described as deaf.
Rene Descartes
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.
Rene Descartes
#75. Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has.
Rene Descartes
#76. 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
#77. Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.
Rene Descartes
#78. 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
#79. It is possible that I am dreaming right now and that all of my perceptions are false.
Rene Descartes
#80. 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
#82. I was convinced that our beliefs are based much more on custom and example than on any certain knowledge.
Rene Descartes
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. It is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
Rene Descartes
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#94. At last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.
Rene Descartes
#95. It is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.
Rene Descartes
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. To know what people really think, pay attention to what they do, rather than what they say.
Rene Descartes
#99. If I find some reason for doubt in each of my beliefs, that will be enough to reject all of them.
Rene Descartes
#100. 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
