Baruch Spinoza Quotes

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

~ 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

Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.

~ Baruch Spinoza

whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived

~ Baruch Spinoza

The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men...

~ Baruch Spinoza

I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.

~ Baruch Spinoza

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

~ Baruch Spinoza

Of all the things that are beyond my power, I value nothing more highly than to be allowed the honor of entering into bonds of friendship with people who sincerely love truth. For, of things beyond our power, I believe there is nothing in the world which we can love with tranquility except such men.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

~ 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

Don’t cry and don’t rage. Understand.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen in him love of justice.

~ Baruch Spinoza

He who, while unacquainted with these writings, nevertheless knows by the natural light that there is a God having the attributes we have recounted, and who also pursues a true way of life, is altogether blessed.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

~ Baruch Spinoza

The purpose of the state is really freedom.

~ 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

It will be said that, although God’s law is inscribed in our hearts, Scripture is nevertheless the Word of God, and it is no more permissible to say of Scripture that it is mutilated and contaminated than to say this of God’s Word. In reply, I have to say that such objectors are carrying their piety too far, and are turning religion into superstition; indeed, instead of God’s Word they are beginning to worship likenesses and images, that is, paper and ink.

~ Baruch Spinoza

If Scripture were to describe the downfall of an empire in the style adopted by political historians, the common people would not be stirred.

~ Baruch Spinoza

Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.

~ 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

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

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

The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body

~ 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

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

For though men be ignorant, yet they are men

~ 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

Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

~ 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

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

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

When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.

~ Baruch Spinoza

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

~ 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

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

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