Cartesian Quotes

1. "Come si può mettere la Nona di Beethoven in un diagramma cartesiano? Ci sono delle realtà che non sono quantificabili. L'universo non è i miei numeri: è pervaso tutto dal mistero. Chi non ha il senso del mistero è un uomo mezzo morto."
Author: Albert Einstein

2. "That we are rational agents—that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations—is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities."
Author: David Bentley Hart

3. "Denied a Lenin and deprived of Napoleon, France retreated into the last and, we must hope, indestructible redoubt, the world of Astérix. The postwar vogue for Parisian thinkers barely concealed their collective retreat into Hexagonal introversion and into the ultimate fortress of French intellectuality, Cartesian theory and puns."
Author: Eric J. Hobsbawm

4. "A person functioning exclusively in the Cartesian mode may be free from manifest symptoms but cannot be considered mentally healthy. Such individuals typically lead ego-centred, competitive, goal-oriented lives. Overpreoccupied with their past and their future, they tend to have a limited awarenessof the present and thus a limited ability to derive satisfaction from ordinary activities in everyday life. They concentrate on manipulating the external world and measure their living standard by the quantity of material possessions, while they become ever more alienated from their inner world and unable to appreciate the process of life. For people whose existence is dominated by this mode of experience no level of wealth, power, or fame will bring genuine satisfaction"
Author: Fritjof Capra

5. "IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung--for one reason alone--because it works.A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing--measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era--we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas."
Author: Hakim Bey

6. "In fact, certainty exists in very different modes. The kind of certainty afforded by a verification that has passed through doubt is different from the immediate living certainty with which all ends and values appear in human consciousness when they make an absolute claim. But the certainty of science is very different from this kind of certainty that is acquired in life. Scientific certainty always has something Cartesian about it. It is the result of a critical method that seeks only to allow what cannot be doubted. This certainty, then, does not proceed from doubts and their being overcome, but is always anterior to any process of being doubted."
Author: Hans Georg Gadamer

7. "The reason I said earlier that the mind is neither the Cartesian, highly intellectualized, cranium-confined firm-and-frozen ego, nor the self-effaced, world-immersed, flowing, field-like non-thingy occurrence, is that even though I was feeling my limbs to be alien to myself, that did not mean that I felt them to be disconnected. Rather, they were intimately connected, yet, merely connected to me, and not phenomenologically proper parts of myself. The mind-world boundary seems to have moved from the skin/environment junction to the innervated/denervated junction within the body. So part of the body has become external to the mind, or ‘de-minded'."
Author: István Aranyosi

8. "We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead."
Author: Maira Kalman

9. "Kafka e Hasek nos põem em confronto com este imenso paradoxo: durante a época dos tempos modernos, a razão cartesiana corroía, um após outro, todos os valores herdados da Idade Média. Mas, no momento da vitória total da razão, é o irracional puro (a força querendo apenas seu querer) que se apossará do cenário do mundo, porque não haverá mais nenhum sistema de valores comumente admitido que possa lhe fazer esse obstáculo."
Author: Milan Kundera

10. "If a tiny flower can struggle and raise itself out of hard rocks to offer its beauty to the world, so can you." From The Cartesian Machine"
Author: Nick Tran

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