Rationalism Quotes: 21 Sourced Quotations, Explained

Descartes5 quotations

Generosity, which is as it were the key to all the other virtues.

On , their position:

I always had an intense desire to learn to distinguish the true from the false, in order to see clearly into my own actions and to walk with confidence in this life.

Discourse on the Method, I

On , their position:

I think, therefore I am.

Discourse on Method, IV

On , their position:

Instead of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools, we may find a practical one […] and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.

Discourse on Method, VI

On , their position:

To strive always to master myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world.

Discourse on Method, III

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Leibniz7 quotations

In every true affirmative proposition the predicate is contained in the subject: praedicatum inest subjecto.

Discourse on Metaphysics, §8; Generales inquisitiones

On , their position:

It follows from the supreme perfection of God that in producing the universe he chose the best possible plan.

Monadology, §55; Theodicy

On , their position:

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.

New Essays on Human Understanding, II, 1

On , their position:

Reasons incline without necessitating.

Theodicy

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Supposing there were a machine whose structure made it think... on visiting it one would find only parts pushing one another, and never anything to explain a perception.

Monadology, §17

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The monads have no windows through which anything could enter or leave.

Monadology, §7

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When a controversy arises, there will be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. It will suffice to take their pens, sit down, and say: let us calculate.

On the Art of Combinations / Letters

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Spinoza9 quotations

A stone receives from an external cause that pushes it a certain quantity of motion... Now conceive that this stone, while it continues to move, thinks and knows that it is striving, as far as it can, to move. This stone, surely, since it is conscious only of its striving, will believe itself entirely free.

Letter 58 to Schuller

On , their position:

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.

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Desire is the very essence of man, insofar as it is conceived as determined to do something by a given affection of itself.

On , their position:

He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.

On , their position:

I have taken great care not to deride human actions, nor to bewail them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.

On , their position:

I shall treat human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.

On , their position:

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

On

This kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things.

On , their position:

Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

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