We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative. - Étienne Gilson

If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it.

If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality.

Up to Descartes' time, and particularly during the Middle Ages, it had always been agreed that philosophy consisted in a transposition of reality into conceptual terms