Baruch Spinoza Quotations

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.

God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

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.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.

We are so constituted by Nature that we easily believe the things we hope for, but believe only with difficulty those we fear, and that we regard such things more or less highly than is just. This is the source of the superstitions by which men everywhere are troubled. For the rest, I don

Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love.

It is sure that those are most desirous of honour or glory who cry out loudest of its abuse and the vanity of the world.

A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.

It is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our body, for our can bear no trace of such existence, neither can eternity be defined in terms of time or have any relation to time. But notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal.

Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.

As though God had turned away from the wise, and written his decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage : for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune : so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate them.

I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them.

He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.

Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same and everywhere one and thesame in her efficiency and power of action; that is, nature's laws and ordinances whereby all things come to pass and change from one form to another, are everywhere and always; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature's universal laws and rules.

Everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.

Everyone has as much right as he has might.

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.

Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them.

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.

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. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

Let unswerving integrity be your watchword.

Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.

The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.

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.

How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

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.

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause.

To understand something is to be delivered of it.

As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits.

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.

The multitude always strains after rarities and exceptions, and thinks little of the gifts of nature; so that, when prophecy is talked of, ordinary knowledge is not supposed to be included. Nevertheless it has as much right as any other to be called Divine.

In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.

What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.

Desire is the essence of a man.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.

The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.

God is a thing that thinks.

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.

The things...are esteemed as the greatest good of all...can be reduced to these three headings: to wit, Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.

God is not He who is, but That which is.

Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness.

The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.

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.

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.

Sadness diminishes a man's powers

Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.

Men are especially intolerant of serving and being ruled by, their equals.

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.

He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconsistent, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.

According as each has been educated, so he repents of or glories in his actions.

Freedom is self-determination.