Baruch Spinoza Quotes
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Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
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From what has been said we can clearly understand the nature of Love and Hate. Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: Hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. We further see, that he who loves necessarily endeavors to have, and to keep present to him, the object of his love; while he who hates endeavors to remove and destroy the object of his hatred.
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Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.
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Whatsoever is, is in God.
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Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.
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True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
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A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.
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Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
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Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.
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The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
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We must take care not to admit as true anything, which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow.
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Except God no substance can be granted or conceived. .. Everything, I say, is in God, and all things which are made, are made by the laws of the infinite nature of God, and necessarily follows from the necessity of his essence.
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Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
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I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.
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For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done.
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Ambition is the immoderate desire for honor.
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Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic.
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A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.
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Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods.
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I do not believe anyone has reached such perfection, surpassing all others, except Christ, to whom God immediately revealed - without words or visions - the conditions which lead to salvation.
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Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
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The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
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The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty.
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He who hates anyone will endeavor to do him an injury, unless he fears that a greater injury will thereby accrue to himself; on the other hand, he who loves anyone will, by the same law, seek to benefit him.