Baruch Spinoza quotes - page 3

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion. (Baruch Spinoza)
No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.
Baruch Spinoza
One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.
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
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
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
Baruch Spinoza
I call him free who is led solely by reason.
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
True virtue is life under the direction of reason.
Baruch Spinoza
In the state of nature, wrong-doing is impossible ; or, if anyone does wrong, it is to himself, not to another.
Baruch Spinoza
So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it. (Baruch Spinoza)
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
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.
Baruch Spinoza
In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch Spinoza
If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.
Baruch Spinoza
Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
Baruch Spinoza
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
Baruch Spinoza
Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.
Baruch Spinoza
Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.
Baruch Spinoza
I do not presume that I have found the best philosophy, I know that I understand the true philosophy.
Baruch Spinoza
Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words. (Baruch Spinoza)
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
Baruch Spinoza
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.
Baruch Spinoza
The rediscovery of Spinoza by the Germans contributed to the shaping of the cultural destinies of the German people for almost two hundred years. Just as at the time of the Reformation no other spiritual force was as potent in German life as the Bible, so during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no other intellectual force so dominated German life as Spinozism. Spinoza became the magnet to German steel. Except for Immanuel Kant and Herbart, Spinoza attracted every great intellectual figure in Germany during the last two centuries, from the greatest, Goethe, to the purest, Lessing.
Baruch Spinoza
But love for an object eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, and a joy which is free from all sorrow. This is something greatly to be desired and to be sought with all our strength.
Baruch Spinoza