Baruch Spinoza Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Philosophical #Learning #Past

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Wisdom #Philosophical #Effort

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Inspirational #Education #Understanding

“Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Life #Chance #Lack Of Knowledge

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Love #Emotional #Emotion

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Two Sides #Two #Matter

“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

#Truth #Science #Ideas

“Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Flow #Causes

“Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Inspirational #Without Hope

“Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but is virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain from our lusts; but on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore we are able to restrain them.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Lust #Delight #Rewards

“We feel and know that we are eternal.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Awareness #Feels

“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Wisdom #Peace #Military

“The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Philosophical #Men #Silence

“What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Life #Want #Genuine Happiness

“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

#Reality #Men #Nuisance

“Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Believe #Moving #Men

“God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Philosophical #Causes

“Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Philosophical #Pride #Men

“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#War #Tyrants #Evil

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Giving Up #Real #Struggle

“Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it...”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Life #Love Is #Hatred

“Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Philosophical

“He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Philosophical #Guidance #Reason

“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

#Men #Hands #Excellent

“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Excellent #Difficult

“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.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Men #Long #Determined

“In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Mind #Eternity #Aspect

“Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Happy #Rewards #Virtue

“Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Believe #Writing #Independent

“I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.”
-- Baruch Spinoza

#Believe #Circles #Triangles