Spinoza Quotes

“Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death – a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race?”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, About The Holy Bible

“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.”
― George Santayana, Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies

“So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend's child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky's front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and 'normality' are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: 'Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.' I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that 'security' and 'normality,' rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men...”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived”
― Baruch Spinoza

“The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione et de Via: Qua Optime in Veram Rerum Cognitionem Dirigitur

“Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“No creo que cuestionar las cosas sea una enfermedad. La obediencia ciega sin cuestionamientos, es la enfermedad.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“The root of the greatest errors in philosophy lies in projecting our human purposes, criteria and preferences into the objective universe.

Hence our "problem of evil"; we strive to reconcile the ills of life with the goodness of God, forgetting the lesson taught to Job, that God is beyond our little good and evil.

Good and bad are relative to human and often individual tastes and ends, and have no validity for a universe in which individuals are ephemera, and in which the Moving Finger writes even the history of the race i water.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.”
― Samuel Moyn

“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.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Our individual separateness is in a sense illusory; we are parts of the great stream of law and cause, parts of God; we are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves, and endless while we die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of eternal light.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct”. Not only his over-all tendency like mine–making knowledge the most powerful affect–but in the five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest figure is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergences are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture and science. In Summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“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.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of "trained skill".

Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers.

"The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not be reason."

Thus democratic government becomes a procession of brief-lived demagogues, and men of worth are loath to enter lists where they must be judged and rated by their inferiors.

Sooner or later the more capable men rebel against such a system, though they be in a minority.

"Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies"; people at last prefer tyranny to chaos.

Equality of power is an unstable condition men are by nature unequal; and "he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Kiek blogybių atsiranda dėl prabangos, pavydo, godumo svaigalų ir kitų panašių dalykų? Vis dėlto jie yra priimtini, nes valstybė negali jų uždrausti įstatymais, kad ir kokie ydingi bebūtų; todėl privalu dar daugiau suteikti sprendimo laisvės, kuri apskritai yra tikra dorybė ir niekaip negali būti uždrausta įstatymais. Be to, iš jos nekyla tokių nepatogumų, kurių (kaip tuoj parodysiu) valstybės pareigūnai negalėtų išvengti; jau nekalbu, kad ji yra būtina mokslo ir menų tobulėjimui, nes jie gali būti sėkmingai vystomi tik tų, kurie turi laisvą ir nevaržomą sprendimą.”
― Spinoza, Tratado Teológico-Político; Tratado Político Tomo II

“XXXII. But human power is very limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. So we do not have an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use. Nevertheless, we shall bear calmly those things which happen to us contrary to what the principle of our advantage demands, if we are conscious that we have done our duty, that the power we have could not have extended itself to the point where we could have avoided those things, and that we are a part of the whole of nature, whose order we follow. If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part of us which is defined by understanding, i.e., the better part of us, will be entirely satisfied with this, and will strive to persevere in that satisfaction. For insofar as we understand, we can want nothing except what is necessary, nor absolutely be satisfied with anything except what is true. Hence, insofar as we understand these things rightly, the striving of the better part of us agrees with the order of the whole of nature. [Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, appendix, trans. Edwin Curley]”
― Spinoza Benedict

“Passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead.

Thought should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“What is often called will, as the impulsive force which determines the duration of an idea in consciousness, should be called desire,-which 'is the very essence of man.' Desire is an appetite or instinct of which we are conscious; but instincts need not always operate through conscious desire.”
― The Story of Philsophy

“I'd say, Doc, I can see you under the aspect of eternity and you're dead.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

“Me voici donc prêt à me libérer de mes anciens attachements pour pouvoir me consacrer pleinement à la recherche du bien suprême.

Un doute pourtant me retient… Ce choix n’est-il pas dangereux ? Les plaisirs, les richesses et les honneurs ne sont certes pas des biens suprêmes, mais au moins, ils existent… Ce sont des biens certains. Alors que ce bien suprême qui est censé me combler en permanence de joie n’est pour l’instant qu’une supposition de mon esprit… Ne suis-je pas en train de m’engager dans une voie périlleuse ?

Non : à la réflexion je vois bien que je ne cours aucun risque en changeant de vie : c’est au contraire en continuant à vivre comme avant que je courrais le plus grand danger. Car l’attachement aux biens relatifs est un mal certain puisque aucun d’eux ne peut m’apporter le bonheur !!! Au contraire, la recherche des moyens du bonheur est un bien certain : elle seule peut m’offrir la possibilité d’être un jour réellement heureux, ou au moins plus heureux…

Le simple fait de comprendre cela me détermine à prendre définitivement et fermement la résolution de me détacher immédiatement de la recherche des plaisirs, des richesses et des honneurs, pour me consacrer en priorité à la création de mon bonheur, c’est-à-dire à la culture des joies les plus solides et les plus durables, par la recherche des biens véritables.

Au moment même où cette pensée jaillit, je sens apparaître en moi un immense sentiment d’enthousiasme, une sorte de libération de mon esprit. J’éprouve un incroyable soulagement, comme si j’avais attendu ce moment toute ma vie. Une joie toute nouvelle vient de se lever en moi, une joie que je n’avais jamais ressentie auparavant : la joie de la liberté que je viens d’acquérir en décidant de ne vivre désormais que pour créer mon bonheur.

J’ai l’impression d’avoir échappé à immense danger… Comme si je me trouvais à présent en sécurité sur le chemin du salut… Car même si je ne suis pas encore sauvé, même si je ne sais pas encore en quoi consistent exactement ces biens absolus, ni même s’il existe réellement un bien suprême, je me sens déjà sauvé d’une vie insensée, privée d’enthousiasme et vouée à une éternelle insatisfaction…

J’ai un peu l’impression d’être comme ces malades qui sont proches d’une mort certaine s’ils ne trouvent pas un remède, n’ayant pas d’autre choix que de rassembler leurs forces pour chercher ce remède sauveur. Comme eux je ne suis certes pas certain de le découvrir, mais comme eux, je ne peux pas faire autrement que de placer toute mon espérance dans sa quête. Je l’ai maintenant compris avec une totale clarté, les plaisirs, les richesses et l’opinion d’autrui sont inutiles et même le plus souvent néfastes pour être dans le bonheur.

Mieux : je sais à présent que mon détachement à leur égard est ce qu’il y a de plus nécessaire dans ma vie, si je veux pouvoir vivre un jour dans la joie. Du reste, que de maux ces attachements n’ont-ils pas engendré sur la Terre, depuis l’origine de l’humanité !

N’est-ce pas toujours le désir de les posséder qui a dressé les hommes les uns contre les autres, engendrant la violence, la misère et même parfois la mort des hommes qui les recherchaient, comme en témoigne chaque jour encore le triste spectacle de l’humanité ? N’est-ce pas l’impuissance à se détacher de ces faux biens qui explique le malheur qui règne presque partout sur le Terre ?

Au contraire, chacun peut voir que les sociétés et les familles vraiment heureuses sont formées d’êtres forts, paisibles et doux qui passent leur vie à construire leur joie et celle des autres sans accorder beaucoup d’importance ni aux plaisirs, ni aux richesses, ni aux honneurs…”
― Bruno Giuliani

“…This law is implanted in us by reason, and God himself obeys it. If human beings do not obey the natural law it is because reason does not entirely govern their behavior. The purpose of a legal is to provide an effective substitute for reason in the motives of unreasonable men. He added, however, that rights are nothing without the power which would enforce them, and therefore that power, not right, is the basic fact of politics.” -Spinoza”
― Roger Scruton

“Whatever the philosophical variety, the authority of exegesis will reside, not in the political sovereign, but in the enlightened philosophy that informs exegesis. Each in turn will provide yet another variation of Spinoza's hermeneutic of condescension. But this is also a hermeneutic of self-divinization. Therefore, each will invest his philosophy with all the religious certainty and zeal originally invested by Spinoza in his particular philosophy, and each will exhibit the same unshakeable faith and enthusiasm in the spread of its gospel and the progressive divinization of humanity. The divinization soon enough focuses on the process rather than the goal.”
― Scott Hahn & Benjamin Wiker

“Pues no hay en absoluto otra vida para el filósofo.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, philosophie pratique

“Baruch Spinoza, um filósofo holandês do século XVII, apresentou uma visão revolucionária de Deus que continua a influenciar o pensamento filosófico e científico até hoje. Em sua obra "Ética", Spinoza descreve Deus não como uma entidade antropomórfica ou transcendente, mas como a única substância infinita, composta por infinitos atributos, que constitui a realidade do universo.”
― Jorge Guerra Pires, Ciência para não cientistas: como ser mais racional em um mundo cada vez mais irracional (Vol. II: Religião) (Inteligência Artificial, Democracia, e Pensamento Crítico)

“Deus é amor. Procede, mas somente se estamos nos referindo ao deus de Espinosa e ao amor fati de Nietsche.”
― Cosme Aristides, A Paisagem Limiar ~ Gênese Vampírica: A conspiração sempre foi outra.

“Spinoza’s (1632—1677) Ethics starts with a clear framework, explanation, and definition of his terms. In that way, the philosophical inquiry becomes more accessible and precise for a reader or interpreter to understand and grasp. When Spinoza, in his definitions, uses the term substance, we understand that it is God. But when the term substance reappears under point III and then again under VI, which treats God, we must question why. For Spinoza, there is substance and substance. What is the difference between the substance under III and VI? We would say that, according to Spinoza, the ultimate, infinite substance is God, and everything formed is of the same substance. If that is the case, all substance is God or Nature. If all substance is God, then the question is, why separate substance from substance?

Spinoza wanted to highlight the difference between the infinite substance of the ultimate Being, God, and the substance that makes Nature in all its forms. But nature, or anything in nature, is substance “which is in itself and is conceived through itself and does not need another “thing” to form it.” Nature is just a manifestation or mode of God or Substance.

Substance (substantia) is not a new term and has been used since Aristotle, if not earlier. Perhaps the substance is interchangeable with terms like arche, aether …. fifth element, proton archon (first principle), Plotinus’ Divine mind (nous), or intelligence. Here are Spinoza’s definitions:

Of God
DEFINITIONS

I. By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing.

II. That thing is called finite in its own kind (in suo genere) which can be limited by another thing of the same nature. For example, a body is called finite because we always conceive another which is greater. So a thought is limited by another thought; but a body is not limited by a thought, nor a thought by a body.

III. By substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words, that the conception of which does not need, the conception of another thing from which it must be formed.
IV. By attribute I understand that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.

V. By mode I understand the modifications of substance, or that which is in another thing through which also it is conceived.

VI. By God I understand Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Spinoza means something very simple, that sadness makes no one intelligent”
― Gilles Deleuze

“Por sustancia entiendo aquello que es en sí y se concibe por sí, esto es aquello cuyo concepto, para formarse, no precisa del concepto de otra cosa”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“Since love of God is the highest felicity and happiness of man, his final end and the aim of all his actions, it follows that he alone observes the divine law who is concerned to love God not from fear of punishment nor love of something else, such as pleasure, fame, ect., but from the single fact that he knows God, or that he knows that the knowledge and love of God is the highest good”
― Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise