Quotes from Baruch Spinoza

Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause ( Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium).

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.

Those who are governed by reason desire nothing for themselves which they do not desire for the rest of humankind.

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.

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

The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Der Endzweck des Staates ist [...] im Grund die Freiheit.

Whether this desire for sex is moderate or not, it is usually called lust.

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

Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow man.

Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from citizens.

Tyranny is most violent where individual beliefs, which are an inalienable right, are regarded as criminal.

So they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of God—in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance.

T]hese instances are enough to show, that the body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which the mind wonders at.

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

For though men be ignorant, yet they are men

The power which the common people ascribe to God is not only a human power (which shows that they look upon God as a man, or as being like a man), but that it also involves weakness.

Citizens are not born, but made.

Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.

I care not for the girdings of superstition, for superstition is the bitter enemy of knowledge & true morality. Yes; it has come to this! Men who openly confess that they can form no idea of God, & only know him through created things, of which they know not the causes, can unblushingly accuse philosophers of Atheism.

I realised that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save in so far as the mind was influenced by them,

In a democratic state nobody transfers his natural right to another so completely that thereafter he is not to be consulted; he transfers it to the majority of the entire community of which he is part. In this way all men remain equal, as they were before in a state of nature.

each will form universal images according to the conditioning of his body.