Top 200 Baruch Spinoza Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”

— Baruch Spinoza

2. “What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.”

— Baruch Spinoza

3. “God is not He who is, but That which is.”

— Baruch Spinoza

4. “The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

— Baruch Spinoza

5. “Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.”

— Baruch Spinoza

6. “If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”

— Baruch Spinoza

7. “I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature.”

— Baruch Spinoza

8. “No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.”

— Baruch Spinoza

9. “Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”

— Baruch Spinoza

10. “Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”

— Baruch Spinoza

11. “I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”

— Baruch Spinoza

12. “Freedom is self-determination.”

— Baruch Spinoza

13. “In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.”

— Baruch Spinoza

14. “Desire is the very essence of man.”

— Baruch Spinoza

15. “The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.”

— Baruch Spinoza

16. “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

— Baruch Spinoza

17. “Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.”

— Baruch Spinoza

18. “I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God.”

— Baruch Spinoza

19. “When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.”

— Baruch Spinoza

20. “Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

— Baruch Spinoza

21. “Big fish eat small fish with as much right as they have power.”

— Baruch Spinoza

22. “No to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand.”

— Baruch Spinoza

23. “In the mind there is no absolute or free will.”

— Baruch Spinoza

24. “I call him free who is led solely by reason.”

— Baruch Spinoza

25. “He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.”

— Baruch Spinoza

26. “There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

28. “Reality and perfection are synonymous.”

— Baruch Spinoza

29. “Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.”

— Baruch Spinoza

30. “Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.”

— Baruch Spinoza

31. “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.”

— Baruch Spinoza

32. “Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”

— Baruch Spinoza

33. “All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.”

— Baruch Spinoza

34. “The proper study of a wise man is not how to die but how to live.”

— Baruch Spinoza

35. “We feel and know that we are eternal.”

— Baruch Spinoza

36. “The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.”

— Baruch Spinoza

37. “Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

39. “So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.”

— Baruch Spinoza

40. “Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.”

— Baruch Spinoza

41. “I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge.”

— Baruch Spinoza

42. “Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.”

— Baruch Spinoza

43. “He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.”

— Baruch Spinoza

44. “A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.”

— Baruch Spinoza

45. “Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind.”

— Baruch Spinoza

46. “How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

— Baruch Spinoza

47. “Sadness diminishes a man’s powers.”

— Baruch Spinoza

48. “Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage : for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune : so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.”

— Baruch Spinoza

49. “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”

— Baruch Spinoza

50. “The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.”

— Baruch Spinoza