Baruch Spinoza Quotes Quotes

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
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.
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
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.
Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.
None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.
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.
Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
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.
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.
The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.
The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
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AuthorName
Baruch Spinoza
Profession
Philosopher
BirthDate
24 November, 1632
DeathDate
21 February, 1677
Country
Netherlands
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