41 Quotes About Descartes

There are some men who are counted great because they represent the actuality of their own age, and mirror it as it is. Such an one was Voltaire, of whom it was epigrammatically said: 'he expressed everybody's thoughts better than anyone.' But there are other men who attain greatness because they embody the potentiality of their own day and magically reflect the future. They express the thoughts which will be everybody's two or three centuries after them. Such as one was Descartes.

As I think therefore I amAm I more if I think more?

The great rationalist Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” The religious mystic the Buddha said, “I think, therefore I am not.” Why is the Buddha much more popular than Descartes? Because the average person barely thinks at all.

I think I am, therefore, I am... I think.

Vinculum alius ergo sum - Another bond, therefore I am.

Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

I think therefore I am, right?""No, not really. A fuller formation of Descartes's philosophy would be Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. 'I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.' Descartes wanted to know if you could really know that anything was real, but he believed his ability to doubt reality proved that, while it might not be real, he was.

Freud introduced the unconscious, which in effect dethroned man as the uncontested master of his own rational faculties. Instead , our lives and our decisions, our loves and our hates, are more often the result of forces working elsewhere than in our conscious mind, and we are the dupes of those forces, rather than their master. (...) Indeed, thinking, as Descartes conceived it, accounts for considerably less than half the story of our being in the world.

Como los humanos viven así, creyendo que primero piensan y luego existen, piensan que todo aquello que no piensa no existe del todo.