He is one of the most important philosophers in human history and the most radical one. Spinoza’s first published work was a systematic presentation of the philosophy of Descartes, but with his own suggestions. His extremely naturalistic views on God, the world, the human being, and knowledge serve to ground a moral philosophy centered on the control of the passions leading to virtue and happiness. Metaphysical speculations continued to dominate his philosophical reflections.
His great ambition was to find an appropriate way to present his rationalistic conviction that the universe is a unitary whole. Respect for deductive reasoning and for the precision of the Latin language led him to express his philosophy in a geometrical form patterned on that used in Euclid’s Elements.
Each of the five books of Spinoza’s Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (Ethics) comprises a sequence of significant propositions, each of which is deduced from those that have come before, leading back to a small set of self-evident definitions and axioms. Of all the greatest ones of the seventeenth century, he is perhaps the most relevant.
(1632-1677)
– Baruch Spinoza Quotes –
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.
~ Baruch Spinoza
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.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.
~ 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.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
~ 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
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
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.
~ 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
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
~ 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
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
Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
~ Baruch Spinoza
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
~ 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
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.
~ Baruch Spinoza
None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.
~ Baruch Spinoza
The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
~ Baruch Spinoza
Will and intellect are one and the same thing.
~ Baruch Spinoza
We feel and know that we are eternal.
~ Baruch Spinoza
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.
~ Baruch Spinoza
God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
~ Baruch Spinoza
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
~ Baruch Spinoza
