Quotes By Baruch Spinoza

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

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

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.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.

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

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

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.

God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

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

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

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

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

All noble things are as difficult as they are rare.

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

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

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.

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

If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Desire is the very essence of man.

Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.