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 SpinozaI have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
Baruch SpinozaLove 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 SpinozaThe greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
Baruch SpinozaMany 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.
Baruch Spinoza