Quotes About Spinoza

Dios es causa inmanente, pero no transitiva, de todas las cosas. [64]

My atheism, like that of Spinoza , is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own free will. I add this only, that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will.

To the honor of Spinoza I must mention that his more accurate understanding explained all general concepts as having to the contrary arisen from an obfuscation of that of which one is perceptually cognizant

Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

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.

When Spinoza says that we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry. He adds that we speak of consciousness, mind, soul, of the power of the soul over the body; we chatter away about these things, but do not even know what bodies can do. Moral chattering replaces true philosophy

Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.

Spinoza is, for me, the 'prince' of philosophers.

In a democracy, says Spinoza, "the welfare of the whole people, not the ruler, is the supreme law

But pantheism is better understood as the idea that God and Nature are two ways of talking about the same thing, and in this sense it is the core religious sensibility of the Enlightenment, from its beginning with Bruno's rediscovery of Lucretius through Locke's proof of a God to the American Revolution. Spinoza did not invent this movement; he epitomized it.

Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

Like Spinoza, he has a certain kind of moral purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man. The life of Plotinus is known

it is here that Spinoza is in the right—a life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.

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

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

The intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.

it is certain that seditions, wars, and contempt or breach of the laws are not so much to be imputed to the wickedness of the subjects, as to the bad state of the dominion.

The knowledge of evil is inadequate knowledge Ethics Book IV, proposition 64

Afflectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius clarum et distinctam formamus ideam.

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "El deseo es la verdadera esencia del hombre" (Spinoza)

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

Spinoza spoke of vitality as the purest virtue, the only virtue. The drive to persist, to flourish, he said, is the absolute quality shared by all living beings. What happens, however, when vitality is inverted, and instead of flourishing, one is driven to eat oneself alive?