Baruch Spinoza Quotes
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The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
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We can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse...we should strive to keep worry from our life.
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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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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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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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Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.
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I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.
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Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
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True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.
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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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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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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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Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
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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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The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.
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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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Ambition is the immoderate desire for honor.
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True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
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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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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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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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The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
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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.