Quotes About Spinoza

Bit by bit they slipped back into their old strange talk. Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari, Philosophy, Spinoza, and other such nonsense which went in one ear and out the other.

Cruelty links all three primitives [pleasure, pain, and desire]: Spinoza defines it as the desire to inflict pain on someone we love or pity. Financial speaking, cruelty is analogous to a convertible bond whose debt and equity depend on three economic underliers: the stock price, the level of interest rates, and the credit worthiness of the company's debt.

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.

In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.

I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

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

Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.

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

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.

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.

The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.

Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.

The intellectual love of the mind towards God is that very love of God whereby God loves himself

in the case of the given numbers 1, 2, 3, everybody can see that the fourth proportional is 6, and all the more clearly because we infer in one single intuition the fourth number from the ratio we see the first number bears to the second.

We there showed that the idea of body and body, that is, mind and body (II. xiii.), are one and the same individual conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension; wherefore the idea of the mind and the mind itself are one and the same thing, which is conceived under one and the same attribute, namely, thought.

that the foundation of all good and evil is love falling on a certain object. For whenever we do not love that object which alone is worthy of being loved, i.e. God, there follow necessarily from that hate and sadness.

2. The essence of things are from all eternity, and unto all eternity shall remain immutable; The existence of God is essence; Therefore...

seulement la foi vraie et la raison qui nous conduisent à la connaissance du bien et du mal.

Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men's way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.

The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.