Baruch Spinoza Quotes

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

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
Baruch Spinoza
 

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
Baruch Spinoza

 

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

 
Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love. Hatred which is completely vanquished by love, passes into love; and love is thereupon greater, than if hatred had not preceded it.
Baruch Spinoza


Nature abhors a vacuum.
Baruch Spinoza

 
Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt.  
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
Baruch Spinoza

 

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
 

Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.
Baruch Spinoza

 
The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.
Baruch Spinoza
 
 
The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
Baruch Spinoza

 

Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
Baruch Spinoza


In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.
Baruch Spinoza
 

What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
Baruch Spinoza



Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.
Baruch Spinoza 

 
Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.
Baruch Spinoza
 


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



The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads -- Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.
Baruch Spinoza

 

No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.
Baruch Spinoza

 
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
Baruch Spinoza


All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
Baruch Spinoza



The doctrines added by certain churches, such as that God took upon Himself human nature, I have expressly said that I do not understand; in fact, to speak the truth, they seem to me no less absurd than would a statement, that a circle had taken upon itself the nature of a, square.
Baruch Spinoza
 


If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Baruch Spinoza



The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure.
Baruch Spinoza


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

 

Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.
Baruch Spinoza

 

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

 

Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.
Baruch Spinoza

 

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
Baruch Spinoza




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