Rene Descartes Quotes

Reason and love are sworn enemies.

Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.

We contend against reason, philosophy, and nature itself; forget the great rule of doing to others as we would they should do unto us ; and after wasting our blood and treasure to no purpose, we at last sit down faint and exhausted, abandon our vain projects only because it is impossible to pursue them, and then leave it to the reasoners of a succeeding age to show how egregious has been our folly, and how blind our fury.

Men will face destructive cannon and mortars, engage each other in the clashing of arms, and meet the horrors of war undaunted, but the devil and his banditti of fiends and emissaries fright them out of their wits…

Mankind is composed of two sorts of men — those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

We get so intellectual that we forget that we're physical creatures.

Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.

During my childhood and teenage years, everything I knew was at war. My mother and father were at war. My sister and I were at war. I was at war with my atypical nature, desperately trying to fit in and be normal. Even my genes were at war - the cool Swiss-German side versus the hot-headed Corsican.

We all live with contradictions.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.

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.

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

We are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not.

The passions of men are commonly more potent than their reason.

The war existing between the senses and reason.

if reason ruled the world would history even exist?

Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.

What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.

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

Even a god finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time. -Amare et sapere vix deo conceditur

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.