Quotes By Baruch Spinoza

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.

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.

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.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

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.

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.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

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

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

Desire is the essence of a man.

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.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

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

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.