Baruch Spinoza Quotes
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It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
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Everyone has as much right as he has might.
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Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
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Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
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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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Whatsoever is, is in God.
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.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.
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In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
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He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.
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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.
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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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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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Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
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Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.
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Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
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Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.
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God is not He who is, but That which is.
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Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.
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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.
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He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives as much as possible to repay the hatred, anger, or contempt of others towards himself with love or generosity. ...hatred is increased by reciprocal hatred, and, on the other hand, can be extinguished by love, so that hatred passes into love.
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It is usually the case with most men that their nature is so constituted that they pity those who fare badly and envy those who fare well.
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Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
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The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, it to understand things by intuition.
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Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.
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The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
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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.
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The terms good and bad indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking or notions, which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf; it is neither good nor bad.
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Big fish eat small fish with as much right as they have power.
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Desire is the essence of a man.
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Statesman are suspected of plotting against mankind, rather than consulting their interests, and are esteemed more crafty than learned.
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