Quotes About Spinoza

Jeeves was on a deck chair outside the back door, reading Spinoza with the cat Augustus on his lap. I had given him the Spinoza at Christmas and he was constantly immersed in it. I hadn't dipped into it myself, but he tells me it is good ripe stuff, well worth perusal. He would have risen at my approach, but I begged him to remain seated, for I knew that Augustus, like L. P. Runkle, resented being woken suddenly, and one always wants to consider a cat's feelings.

The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.

Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief two hundred pages a man has written down his lifetime's thought with stoic sculptury of everything superfluous.

Read the book not all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have but begun to understand it. Read then some commentary, like Pollock's Spinoza, or Martineau's Study of Spinoza, or better, both. Finally, read the Ethics again; it will be a new book to you. When you have finished it a second time you will remain forever a lover of philosophy.

When I introspect I perceive not merely sensations and ideas but desire, will, ambition, and pride as vital phases of me. Spinoza was right: "desiderium ipsa essentia hominis"—desire is the very essence of man. We are living flames of desire until we admit final defeat. Will is desire expressed in ideas that become actions unless impeded by contrary or substitute desires and ideas. Character is the sum of our desires, fears, propensities, habits, abilities, and ideas.

All political philosophy, Spinoza thins, must grow out of a distinction between the natural and the moral order...without law or social organization...might and right were one...The rights of states are now what the rights of individuals used to be (and still often are), that is, they are mights...among men, as mutual need begets mutual aid...passes into a moral order of rights. (Chapter on Spinoza, p.191/543)

Obey even the unjust law, answers Spinoza, if reasonable protest and discussions are allowed and speech is left free to secure a peaceful change.

Spinoza was right: "in so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect it participates in eternity."127

Spinoza compares the feeling of free will to a stone's thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall.

Scripture does not explain things by their secondary causes, but only narrates them in the order and style which has most power to move men... It's object is not to convince the reason, but to attract and last hold of the imagination. (Chapter on Spinoza, p.162/543)

Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor.

A partir de estas definiciones, Spinoza procede por medio de pruebas euclidianas a construir un sistema determinista e irrefutable que abarca todo el universo.

But if I should live to be very old, I have laid plans for that so that it will not be too tiresome. So far, I have never used coffee, liquor, nor any form of stimulant. When I get old, and my joints and bones tell me about it, I can sit around and write for myself, if for nobody else, and read slowly and carefully the mysticism of the East, and re-read Spinoza with love and care. All the while my days can be a succession of coffee cups. Then

Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. The phrase encompassed Spinoza's radical notion that God and nature might be one and the same. It was the springing-off point for Spinoza's mind-bending contentions about extension, determinism, and more.

Deus sive Natura.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

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

Spinoza tells us that we do not desire or detest things because we judge them to be good or evil; we judge them good or evil because we desire or detest them.

In the mind there is no absolute faculty of willing and not willing, but only of particular volitions, namely, this or that affirmation, or this or that negation."50 We do suspend our belief in some ideas, in a manner of speaking, Spinoza allows. But what this really means is that we affirm some other idea—namely, that the first idea is uncertain.

Paraphrasing Spinoza, Alexandre adds, "In pity, sadness comes first. I am sad that the other is suffering, but I don't really love him. In compassion, love comes first."23 The

Happiness is not the reward of virtue," said Spinoza in his book Ethics, "but virtue itself; nor do we delight in happiness because we restrain our lusts; but, on the contrary, because we delight in it, therefore are we able to restrain them.

Bir duygu, hakk?nda aç?k bir fikir olu?turdu?umuz anda ihtiras olmaktan ç?kar." - Spinoza

Perhaps most dangerously, Cohen claimed that Spinoza created certain negative stereotypes about Judaism and biblical religion that were later to influence Kant, who depended upon Spinoza's research. Spinoza thus stands accused of being the chief "prosecutor" of Judaism before a hostile Gentile world.25

the Spinoza tercentennial.32 He begins the essay by surveying the reception of Spinoza from condemnation after his excommunication, to partial vindication at the hands of Mendelssohn, to canonization by Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine, to the scholarly neutrality of the twentieth century.