"Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?" I asked. "It was Descartes," he said. After a moment he looked me in the eye. "And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes mathematical analysis?" he asked. "Well, the rainbow is actually a section of a cone that appears as an arc of the colors of the spectrum when drops of water are illuminated by sunlight behind the observer." "And?" "I suppose his inspiration was the realization that the problem could be analyzed by considering a single drop, and the geometry of the situation." "Youre overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon," he said. "Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory?" "I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful." I looked at him sheepishly. He looked at me. "Hows your work coming?" he asked. I shrugged. "Its not really coming." I wished I was like Constantine. It all came so easily to him. "Let me ask you something. Think back to when you were a kid. For you, that isnt going too far back. When you were a kid, did you love science? Was it your passion?" I nodded. "As long as I can remember." "Me, too," he said. "Remember, its supposed to be fun." And he walked on."
René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, logician, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science during the Renaissance era. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry.
"Doubt is the origin of wisdom and Latin: Dubium sapientiae initium. This has been attributed to Descartes, including here previously, but no original attribution has been found. Descartes Meditationes de prima philosophia has been cited as the source of Dubium sapientiae initium, but this quote is not found in this work."
"[E]arly analytic geometers—Descartes in particular—did not accept that geometry could be based on numbers or algebra. Perhaps the first to take the idea of arithmetizing geometry seriously was Wallis..."
"An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?"
"He has given us only some beautiful beginnings, without getting to the bottom of things. ...he is still far from the true analysis and the general art of discovery. For I am convinced that his mechanics is full of errors, that his physics goes too fast, that his geometry is too narrow, and that his metaphysics is all these things."
"Modesty was not a condition from which Descartes suffered."
"René Descartes played his part in the world as a man in a mask. The phrase is his own. It implied no conscious duplicity but a certain apartness rendering him incapable of taking his share unreservedly in the game of life. His attitude was that of an unimpassioned spectator. He looked on and learned while others struggled for the stakes. A born recluse, he remained solitary even in the throng of social intercourse. ...The transport felt by Bacon at the glorious vision of a future in which the harvest he had sown would be reaped was not shared by Descartes. He indeed held himself to be the sower and the reaper in one. Calmly, and with settled conviction, he claimed to have virtually expounded all the phenomena of nature. He had crossed the frontier of the new world of knowledge; those who desired to follow him needed only to purge their eyes with the euphrasy of methodic doubt in order to obtain those crystal-clear intuitions from which, by sure reasoning, universal science could be deduced. ...He was a mathematician of first rate originality and power. ...Unfortunately, however, he was misled by false analogies of thought; he sought to universalise what was by its nature special and restricted; and thus pursued the flitting vision of a deceptive unity in knowledge. As the upshot, he gave to his philosophy a pseudo-mathematical character, and sacrificed the solid achievement of much by aiming at the illusory certainty of everything."
"At one point a heated discussion arose over the possible interpretation of Lolita as a grandiose metaphor of the classic Europeans hopeless love for young, seductive, barbaric America. In his afterword to the novel Nabokov himself mentions this as the naive theory of one of the publishers who turned the book down. And although there cant be the slightest doubt that Nabokov did not mean to limit Lolita to that interpretation, there is no reason to exclude it as one of the novels many dimensions. The point, I felt, became obvious when one drew the line between Lolita as a delightfully frivolous story on the verge of pornography and Lolita as a literary masterpiece, the only convincing love story of our century."
Lolita"Lovely food, for rabbits, that is."
"One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved."
Romain Rolland"[explaining to Ernie how April apologized to him] She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that Ive only ever seen in nature films."
MouseHunt (film)"Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised."
Guy de Maupassant"He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. That was evident in such things as the deplorable state of the station. He had no learning, and no intelligence. His position had come to him — why? Perhaps because he was never ill . . . He had served three terms of three years out there . . . Because triumphant health in the general rout of constitutions is a kind of power in itself."