Rene Descartes Quotes

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Man is a rational animal – so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.

Suppose, gentleman, that man is not stupid.

To be rational is so glorious a thing, that two-legged creatures generally content themselves with the title.

Man is a reasoning Animal.

Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above our fellow-creatures, the brutes, in this lower world.

If we did not have rational souls, we would not be able to believe.

Reason is God's crowning gift to man.

I possess a strong sense of reason.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

It is what makes us human, what distinguishes us from other animals. We can be aware of being aware.

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.

Reasonable, sensible men can always make a reasonable scheme appear such to other reasonable men.

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

High IQ individuals don't like surprises and are pessimistic, because it's logical.

Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.

I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.