41 Quotes About Descartes

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.

I think, therefore I am... confused.

I love, therefore I am.

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.

The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason.

Gratitude is a species of love, excited in us by some action of the person for whom we have it, and by which we believe that he has done some good to us, or at least that he has had the intention of doing so. Passions, III, 193. XI, 473-474. Trans. John Morris

The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: 'I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive.

To paraphrase Descartes again: "I think; therefore I have no access to the level where I sum.

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.