Top 100 Baruch Spinoza Quotes
#1. He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.
Baruch Spinoza
#2. Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
Baruch Spinoza
#3. A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.
Baruch Spinoza
#4. Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more easily than their words.
Baruch Spinoza
#6. 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
#7. Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.
Baruch Spinoza
#8. What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter
Baruch Spinoza
#9. 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
#10. Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
Baruch Spinoza
#11. Such things as are good simply because they have been commanded or instituted, or as being symbols of something good, are mere shadows which cannot be reckoned among actions that are the offspring, as it were, or fruit of a sound mind and of intellect.
Baruch Spinoza
#13. The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.
Baruch Spinoza
#14. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
Baruch Spinoza
#15. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#16. Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen in him love of justice.
Baruch Spinoza
#17. He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.
Baruch Spinoza
#18. No reason compels me to maintain that the body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse. And, indeed, experience seems to urge a different conclusion. Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said he was the same man.
Baruch Spinoza
#19. What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
Baruch Spinoza
#20. Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
Baruch Spinoza
#21. Finally, it follows from the preceding proposition that the joy by which the drunkard is enslaved is altogether different from the joy which is the portion of the philosopher,
a think I wished just to hint in passing.
Baruch Spinoza
#23. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#24. He who wishes to revenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. But he who endeavors to drive away hatred by means of love, fights with pleasure and confidence; he resists equally one or many men, and scarcely needs at all the help of fortune. Those whom he conquers yield joyfully
Baruch Spinoza
#25. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#26. Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another.
Baruch Spinoza
#27. Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.
Baruch Spinoza
#28. Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.
Baruch Spinoza
#29. By emotion I mean the modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications.
Baruch Spinoza
#30. The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
Baruch Spinoza
#31. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#32. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#34. Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.
Baruch Spinoza
#35. The body is affected by the image of the thing, in the same way as if the thing were actually present.
Baruch Spinoza
#36. Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it ...
Baruch Spinoza
#38. He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.
Baruch Spinoza
#39. It is certain that seditions, wars, and contempt or breach of the laws are not so much to be imputed to the wickedness of the subjects, as to the bad state of the dominion.
Baruch Spinoza
#40. I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy.
Baruch Spinoza
#42. Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza
#43. Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
Baruch Spinoza
#44. I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.
Baruch Spinoza
#45. The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.
Baruch Spinoza
#46. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.
Baruch Spinoza
#47. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#48. Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
Baruch Spinoza
#49. The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
Baruch Spinoza
#50. It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another.
Baruch Spinoza
#51. The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things
Baruch Spinoza
#52. There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
Baruch Spinoza
#53. True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
Baruch Spinoza
#55. Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.
Baruch Spinoza
#56. 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
#57. There is no fear without some hope, and no hope without some fear.
Baruch Spinoza
#58. That by the decrees and volitions, and consequently the providence of God, Scripture (as I will prove by Scriptural examples) means nothing but Nature's order following necessarily from her eternal laws.
Baruch Spinoza
#60. 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
#61. No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.
Baruch Spinoza
#62. So they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of God - in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance.
Baruch Spinoza
#63. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#64. 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
#65. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#66. Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind.
Baruch Spinoza
#68. None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
Baruch Spinoza
#69. Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
Baruch Spinoza
#70. Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.
Baruch Spinoza
#72. We strive to further the occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to Joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is contrary to it, or will lead to Sadness.
Baruch Spinoza
#73. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#75. The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
Baruch Spinoza
#76. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#77. The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
Baruch Spinoza
#78. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#79. No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.
Baruch Spinoza
#80. If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred.
Baruch Spinoza
#81. Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.
Baruch Spinoza
#82. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#84. In regard to intellect and true virtue, every nation is on a par with the rest, and God has not in these respects chosen one people rather than another.
Baruch Spinoza
#85. The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.
Baruch Spinoza
#86. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#87. Everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates ... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking ...
Baruch Spinoza
#88. Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind.
Baruch Spinoza
#89. If anyone conceives, that an object of his love joins itself to another with closer bonds of friendship than he himself has attained to, he will be affected with hatred towards the loved object and with envy towards his rival.
Baruch Spinoza
#90. A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.
Baruch Spinoza
#91. Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
Baruch Spinoza
#92. Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
Baruch Spinoza
#93. The greater emotion with which we conceive a loved object to be affected toward us, the greater will be our complacency.
Baruch Spinoza
#95. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#96. Men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man.
Baruch Spinoza
#97. A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.
Baruch Spinoza
#98. 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
#99. The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.
Baruch Spinoza
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