“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“those, who are believed to be most self—abased and humble, are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious”
— Baruch Spinoza
“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Even more, in the created thing, is a perfection that she exists; since the greatest of all imperfections is, not to exist.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“I call him free who is led solely by reason.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security… In fact the true aim of government is liberty.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men’s thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden… He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor’s hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“For though men be ignorant, yet they are men”
— Baruch Spinoza
“The formation of society serves not only for defensive purposes, but is also very useful, and, indeed, absolutely necessary, as rendering possible the division of labor. If men did not render mutual assistance to each other, no one would have either the skill or the time to provide for his own sustenance and preservation: for all men are not equally apt for all work, and no one would be capable of preparing all that he individually stood in need of. Strength and time, I repeat, would fail, if every one had in person to plow, to sow, to reap, to grind corn, to cook, to weave, to stitch and perform the other numerous functions required to keep life going; to say nothing of the arts and sciences which are also entirely necessary to the perfection and blessedness of human nature.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men’s way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.”
— Baruch Spinoza
“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
“Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind.”
— Baruch Spinoza