Baruch Spinoza Quotes
-
All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of menб that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.
-
Faith is nothing but obedience and piety.
-
It is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our body, for our can bear no trace of such existence, neither can eternity be defined in terms of time or have any relation to time. But notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal.
-
I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.
-
No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.
-
He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.
-
All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate them.
-
God and all attributes of God are eternal.
-
If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.
-
Men are especially intolerant of serving and being ruled by, their equals.
-
Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.
-
In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another. For no one by the law of nature is bound to please another, unless he chooses, nor to hold anything to be good or evil, but what he himself, according to his own temperament, pronounces to be so; and, to speak generally, nothing is forbidden by the law of nature, except what is beyond everyone's power.
-
Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love.
-
Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage : for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune : so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.
-
Let unswerving integrity be your watchword.
-
In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.
-
Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.
-
To comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true. Conscious analysis - which, depending on the idea, may occur almost immediately or with considerable effort - allows the mind to reject what it intially accepted as fact.
-
If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.
-
Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.
-
Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health.
-
Reality and perfection are synonymous.
-
Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious.
-
The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.