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The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.
Baruch Spinoza -
Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.
Baruch Spinoza
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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.
Baruch Spinoza -
In the mind there is no absolute or free will.
Baruch Spinoza -
A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.
Baruch Spinoza -
A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.
Baruch Spinoza -
.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.
Baruch Spinoza -
The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.
Baruch Spinoza
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Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.
Baruch Spinoza -
Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another.
Baruch Spinoza -
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.
Baruch Spinoza -
Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
Baruch Spinoza -
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.
Baruch Spinoza -
Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
Baruch Spinoza
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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.
Baruch Spinoza -
I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.
Baruch Spinoza -
. . . to know the order of nature, and regard the universe as orderly is the highest function of the mind.
Baruch Spinoza -
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.
Baruch Spinoza -
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.
Baruch Spinoza -
Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.
Baruch Spinoza
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If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts.
Baruch Spinoza -
All is One (Nature, God).
Baruch Spinoza -
Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all.
Baruch Spinoza -
Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain from our lusts; but on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we are able to restrain them.
Baruch Spinoza