Baruch Spinoza Quotes
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No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.
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He, who knows how to distinguish between true and false, must have an adequate idea of true and false.
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Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.
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He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing.
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Big fish eat small fish with as much right as they have power.
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According as each has been educated, so he repents of or glories in his actions.
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In regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.
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Laws which can be broken without any wrong to one's neighbor are a laughing-stock; and such laws, instead of restraining the appetites and lusts of mankind, serve rather to heighten them. Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata [we always resist prohibitions, and yearn for what is denied us].
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Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health.
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Reality and perfection are synonymous.
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No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.
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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.
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Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity.
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I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.
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Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
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The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.
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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.
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Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness.
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The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.
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The safest way for a state is to lay down the rule that religion is comprised solely in the exercise of charity and justice, and that the rights of rulers in sacred, no less than in secular matters, should merely have to do with actions, but that every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.
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The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
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The eternal wisdom of God ... has shown itself forth in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Jesus Christ.
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In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
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Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love.