Baruch Spinoza Quotes

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

Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind.

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

Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.

In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another.

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.

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

In the mind there is no absolute or free will.

Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health.

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.

The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, ... but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.

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.

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.

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.

Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.

Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear.

He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.

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

We can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse...we should strive to keep worry from our life.

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.

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

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

To understand something is to be delivered of it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God.

He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing.

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

If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.

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.

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.

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

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

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

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.

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.