A Quote by Rene Descartes

Desire awakens only to things that are thought possible.

Rene Descartes

Quote Topics

Desire Only Possible Things Thought

Quote Author

Rene Descartes
French - Mathematician
March 31, 1596 - February 11, 1650

A great song awakens something in your body / mind / spirit or history that you had forgotten about. It ignites some emotional kindling that you didn't even know you had stored. It awakens you to a possibility for the future - be it hope or excitement - that you never knew was possible.

Greta Salpeter

It is possible, of course, to operate with figures mechanically, just as it is possible to speak like a parrot: but that hardly deserves the names of thought. It only becomes possible at all after the mathematical notation has, as a result of genuine thought, been so developed that it does the thinking for us, so to speak.

Gottlob Frege

Personally, I don't think it's possible to do great things alone or through individual actions. On the contrary, I think it is only possible to know what to do in a specific moment once you have understood the zeitgeist, and it is only possible to move things forward if you have a sense of responsibility. And that is exactly the goal I have set for myself: to try to encourage France and the French people to change and develop further.

Emmanuel Macron

The fact that only humans above a certain age can be morally virtuous, rather than babies or cats, means that that being moral requires some cognitive ability. If virtue is about desires, it is worth remembering that you can't desire some things without being able to conceive of them. Suppose a virtuous person will desire to make people happy and desire to tell the truth. You can't desire to make people happy without having the concept "happy" and you can't desire to be truthful if you don't have have the concept "lie", so a cat or a baby cannot desire these things.

Nomy Arpaly

I don't think we're capable of knowledge, but I like to keep an open mind. So if you ask me whether I believe in an afterlife or not, whether I believe in God or not, I can only answer you that all things are possible. And if all things are possible, heaven and hell and the angels are also possible. They're not to be ruled out.

Jorge Luis Borges

The dark is a quiet place. Reflection and contemplation are the only things to do in it. Well that, and imagine the worst things possible. I don’t have to reflect or contemplate or any of those things. I know what the worst things possible are. I know about the things that hide in the dark. Insanity is the least of them.

Tara Brown

True prayer is only another name for the love of God. Its excellence does not consist in the multitude of our words; for our Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him. The true prayer is that of the heart, and the heart prays only for what it desires. To pray, then is to desire -- but to desire what God would have us desire. He who asks what he does not from the bottom of his heart desire, is mistaken in thinking that he prays.

Francois Fenelon

The intellect alone has an eye for viewing an essence, which it cannot see except in the true Cause, which is the Fount of all desire. Moreover, since all things seek to exist, then in all things there is desire from the Fount-of-desire, wherein being and desire coincide in the Same.

Nicholas of Cusa

I desire to go through life knowing as little of evil in it as possible. To this end, I sometimes avoid looking too closely into the nature of things, studying them only so far as they seem to be good, and abandoning interest in them as soon as their darker feature begin to appear. The good only deserves a hearty interest.

Christian Nestell Bovee

I lose hope when the desire for life awakens within me; but I regain it whenever the longing for death comes upon me.

Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski

Celebration is not because some desire is fulfilled - because no desire is ever fulfilled. Desire as such cannot be fulfilled. Desire is only a way to avoid the present moment. Desire creates the future and takes you far away. Desire is a drug; it keeps you stoned, it does not allow you to see the reality - that which is herenow.

Rajneesh

And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day.

Charles Dickens

Thought can never be compared with action, but when it awakens in us the image of truth.

Madame de Stael

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since.

Tom Hodgkinson

As radical as it may seem, it is possible to do things only out of play. I believe that to the degree that we engage moment by moment in the playfulness of enriching life- motivated solely by the desire for its enrichment- to that degree are we being compassionate with ourselves.