Top 100 Baruch Spinoza Sayings
#1. Men believe themselves to have free will because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined. - BARUCH SPINOZA
Cris Evatt
#2. All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.
Heinrich Heine
#3. Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.
Baruch Spinoza
#4. 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
#5. The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
Baruch Spinoza
#6. Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
Baruch Spinoza
#7. A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.
Baruch Spinoza
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
Baruch Spinoza
#12. Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.
Baruch Spinoza
#13. 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
#14. God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence.
Corr. Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.
Baruch Spinoza
#15. Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.
Baruch Spinoza
#16. What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter
Baruch Spinoza
#17. The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, it to understand things by intuition.
Baruch Spinoza
#18. 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
#19. He who, while unacquainted with these writings, nevertheless knows by the natural light that there is a God having the attributes we have recounted, and who also pursues a true way of life, is altogether blessed.
Baruch Spinoza
#20. Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
Baruch Spinoza
#21. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#22. Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
Baruch Spinoza
#23. 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
#24. I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.
Baruch Spinoza
#26. The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.
Baruch Spinoza
#27. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
Baruch Spinoza
#28. If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
Baruch Spinoza
#29. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#30. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#32. I have resolved to demonstrate by a certain and undoubted course of argument, or to deduce from the very condition of human nature, not what is new and unheard of, but only such things as
agree best with practice.
Baruch Spinoza
#33. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#34. 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
#35. Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
Baruch Spinoza
#36. He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.
Baruch Spinoza
#37. Emotion, which is called a passivity of the soul, is a confused idea, whereby the mind affirms concerning its body, or any part thereof, a force for existence (existendi vis) greater or less than before, and by the presence of which the mind is determined to think of one thing rather than another.
Baruch Spinoza
#38. Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind.
Baruch Spinoza
#39. 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
#40. What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
Baruch Spinoza
#41. Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
Baruch Spinoza
#42. In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch Spinoza
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature
Baruch Spinoza
#48. Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all.
Baruch Spinoza
#49. 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
#50. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#51. In proportion as we endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason, shall we strive as much as possible to depend less on hope, to liberate ourselves from fear, to rule fortune, and to direct our actions by the sure counsels of reason.
Baruch Spinoza
#52. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#53. If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes that he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return.
Baruch Spinoza
#54. Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another.
Baruch Spinoza
#55. Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.
Baruch Spinoza
#56. Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.
Baruch Spinoza
#57. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#58. Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.
Baruch Spinoza
#59. 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
#60. No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.
Baruch Spinoza
#61. The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
Baruch Spinoza
#62. 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
#63. Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.
Baruch Spinoza
#64. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#65. Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
Baruch Spinoza
#66. Whether this desire for sex is moderate or not, it is usually called lust.
Baruch Spinoza
#67. A free man, who lives among ignorant people, tries as much as he can to refuse their benefits.. He who lives under the guidance of reason endeavours as much as possible to repay his fellow's hatred, rage, contempt, etc. with love and nobleness.
Baruch Spinoza
#68. These are the prejudices which I undertook to notice here. If any others of a similar character remain, they can easily be rectified with a little thought by anyone.
Baruch Spinoza
#69. Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
Baruch Spinoza
#70. The intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.
Baruch Spinoza
#71. 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
#73. Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.
Baruch Spinoza
#74. 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
#75. The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
Baruch Spinoza
#76. The body is affected by the image of the thing, in the same way as if the thing were actually present.
Baruch Spinoza
#77. Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it ...
Baruch Spinoza
#80. He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.
Baruch Spinoza
#81. If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.
Baruch Spinoza
#82. 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
#83. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.
Albert Einstein
#84. I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy.
Baruch Spinoza
#85. I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.
Baruch Spinoza
#86. When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.
Baruch Spinoza
#88. Big fish eat small fish with as much right as they have power.
Baruch Spinoza
#90. To know the order of nature, and regard the universe as orderly is the highest function of the mind.
Baruch Spinoza
#91. There can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.
Baruch Spinoza
#92. Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza
#93. I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge.
Baruch Spinoza
#94. Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
Baruch Spinoza
#95. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#96. I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.
Baruch Spinoza
#97. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#98. The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.
Baruch Spinoza
#99. Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.
Baruch Spinoza
#100. 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
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