Top 100 Spinoza's Quotes
#1. I believe in Spinoza's God, who revealed himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men - a more subtle religious view embraced by
Carl Sagan
#2. 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
#3. In 1921, a New York rabbi asked Einstein if he believed in God. "I believe in Spinoza's God," he answered, "who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
Jim Holt
#4. Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
#5. I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Bertrand Russell
#6. Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor.
Lev Shestov
#7. And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?
Rollo May
#8. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things
Albert Einstein
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Only free men are thoroughly grateful one to another.
Baruch Spinoza
#14. Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.
Baruch Spinoza
#15. Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.
Baruch Spinoza
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes
T. S. Eliot
#20. In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch Spinoza
#21. The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
Gilles Deleuze
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all.
Baruch Spinoza
#25. I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature
Baruch Spinoza
#26. 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
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? - "Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam." Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. The
Viktor E. Frankl
#31. Of all heroes , Spinoza was Einstein 's greatest. No one expressed more strongly then he a belief in the harmony , the beauty , and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature .
John Archibald Wheeler
#33. Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them.
Baruch Spinoza
#34. Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.
Baruch Spinoza
#35. The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
Baruch Spinoza
#36. Whatever increases, decreases, limits or extends the body's power of action, increases decreases, limits, or extends the mind's power of action. And whatever increases, decreases, limits, or extends the mind's power of action, also increases, decreases, limits, or extends the body's power of action.
Baruch Spinoza
#37. 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.
Baruch Spinoza
#38. The holy word of God is on everyone's lips ... but ... we see almost everyone presenting their own versions of God's word, with the sole purpose of using religion as a pretext for making others think as they do.
Baruch Spinoza
#39. 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
#40. True piety for the universe but no time for religions made for man's convenience.
Baruch Spinoza
#41. Laws which can be broken without any wrong to one's neighbor are a laughing-stock; and such laws, instead of restraining the appetites and lusts of mankind, serve rather to heighten them. Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata [we always resist prohibitions, and yearn for what is denied us].
Baruch Spinoza
#42. 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
#43. Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.
Baruch Spinoza
#44. The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.
Baruch Spinoza
#45. 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
#46. The intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.
Baruch Spinoza
#47. Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
Baruch Spinoza
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Whether this desire for sex is moderate or not, it is usually called lust.
Baruch Spinoza
#51. Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
Baruch Spinoza
#52. 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
#53. Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.
Baruch Spinoza
#54. 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
#56. The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, it to understand things by intuition.
Baruch Spinoza
#57. What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter
Baruch Spinoza
#58. No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine
Christopher Hitchens
#59. Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.
Baruch Spinoza
#60. 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
#61. Spinoza had argued that God, synonymous with nature, was immutable and eternal, leaving no room for chance. Agreeing with Spinoza, Einstein sought the invariant rules governing nature's mechanisms. He was absolutely determined to prove that the world was absolutely determined.
Paul Halpern
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
Baruch Spinoza
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Spinoza spoke of vitality as the purest virtue, the only virtue. The drive to persist, to flourish, he said, is the absolute quality shared by all living beings. What happens, however, when vitality is inverted, and instead of flourishing, one is driven to eat oneself alive?
Michael Greenberg
#69. Paraphrasing Spinoza, Alexandre adds, "In pity, sadness comes first. I am sad that the other is suffering, but I don't really love him. In compassion, love comes first."23 The
Matthieu Ricard
#70. It is here that Spinoza is in the right - a life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
#71. Schopenhauer and Spinoza distilled, condensed, and funneled through the pupil, along the optic nerve, and directly into our occipital lobes. I'd love to be able to eat with my eyes - I'm
Irvin D. Yalom
#72. 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
#73. A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.
Baruch Spinoza
#74. Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
Baruch Spinoza
#75. The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
Baruch Spinoza
#76. 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
#77. Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.
Baruch Spinoza
#78. Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).
Baruch Spinoza
#79. What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
Baruch Spinoza
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.
Baruch Spinoza
#84. Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
Baruch Spinoza
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
Baruch Spinoza
#91. If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
Baruch Spinoza
#92. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
Baruch Spinoza
#93. The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.
Baruch Spinoza
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
Baruch Spinoza
#98. 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
#99. Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
Baruch Spinoza
#100. 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
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