The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Rene DescartesRead
Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
Interpretation
Traveling allows us to connect with people and ideas from different times and places.
Descartes suggests that through travel, we engage with a rich tapestry of human experience that transcends our own era. By visiting historical sites or cultures, we gain insights and perspectives from past societies, enabling us to understand the continuity and evolution of thought throughout history.
In practice
During a lecture on history, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of experiential learning.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
If we possessed a thorough knowledge of all the parts of the seed of any animal (e.g. man), we could from that alone, be reasons entirely mathematical and certain, deduce the whole conformation and figure of each of its members, and, conversely if we knew several peculiarities of this conformation, we would from those deduce the nature of its seed.
Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.
Before examining this more carefully and investigating its consequences, I want to dwell for a moment in the contemplation of God, to ponder His attributes in me, to see, admire, and adore the beauty of His boundless light, insofar as my clouded insight allows. Believing that the supreme happiness of the other life consists wholly of the contemplation of divine greatness, I now find that through less perfect contemplation of the same sort I can gain the greatest joy available in this life.
I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.
The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.
A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture.
But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel.
Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.