Baruch Spinoza Quotes

"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

"Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand."

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

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

"Happiness is a virtue, not its reward."

"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."

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

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

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

"Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived."

"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."

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

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

"Desire is the very essence of man."

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

"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."

"Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself."

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

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

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