Top 200 Baruch Spinoza Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.”

— Baruch Spinoza

102. “The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed along with the body, but something of it remains, which is eternal.”

— Baruch Spinoza

103. “Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.”

— Baruch Spinoza

104. “Reason is no match for passion.”

— Baruch Spinoza

105. “Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.”

— Baruch Spinoza

106. “True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.”

— Baruch Spinoza

107. “Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause.”

— Baruch Spinoza

108. “I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

110. “Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also.”

— Baruch Spinoza

111. “Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt.”

— Baruch Spinoza

112. “Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.”

— Baruch Spinoza

113. “Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.”

— Baruch Spinoza

114. “As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits.”

— Baruch Spinoza

115. “Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.”

— Baruch Spinoza

116. “Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.”

— Baruch Spinoza

117. “If slavery, barbarism and desolation are to be called peace, men can have no worse misfortune.”

— Baruch Spinoza

118. “The purpose of the state is really freedom.”

— Baruch Spinoza

119. “Faith is nothing but obedience and piety.”

— Baruch Spinoza

120. “All the objects pursued by the multitude not only bring no remedy that tends to preserve our being, but even act as hinderances, causing the death not seldom of those who possess them, and always of those who are possessed by them.”

— Baruch Spinoza

121. “The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.”

— Baruch Spinoza

122. “When we love a thing similar to ourselves, we endeavor, as far as we can, to bring about that it should love us in return.”

— Baruch Spinoza

123. “According as each has been educated, so he repents of or glories in his actions.”

— Baruch Spinoza

124. “Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws.”

— Baruch Spinoza

125. “Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.”

— Baruch Spinoza

126. “Citizens are not born, but made.”

— Baruch Spinoza

127. “No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.”

— Baruch Spinoza

128. “If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.”

— Baruch Spinoza

129. “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body.”

— Baruch Spinoza

130. “By reality and perfection I mean the same thing.”

— Baruch Spinoza

131. “True virtue is life under the direction of reason.”

— Baruch Spinoza

132. “Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.”

— Baruch Spinoza

133. “Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.”

— Baruch Spinoza

134. “God is a thing that thinks.”

— Baruch Spinoza

135. “Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.”

— Baruch Spinoza

136. “What can be more calamitous than that men should be regarded as enemies and put to death, not for any crime or misdeed, but for being of independent mind?”

— Baruch Spinoza

137. “Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.”

— Baruch Spinoza

138. “A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present.”

— Baruch Spinoza

139. “Even more, in the created thing, is a perfection that she exists; since the greatest of all imperfections is, not to exist.”

— Baruch Spinoza

140. “Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition.”

— Baruch Spinoza

141. “If anyone conceives, that an object of his love joins itself to another with closer bonds of friendship than he himself has attained to, he will be affected with hatred towards the loved object and with envy towards his rival.”

— Baruch Spinoza

142. “Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.”

— Baruch Spinoza

143. “The greatest secret of monarchic rule... is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting.”

— Baruch Spinoza

144. “Things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind.”

— Baruch Spinoza

145. “Superstitious persons, who know better how to rail at vice than how to teach virtue, and who strive not to guide men by reason, but so to restrain them that they would rather escape evil than love virtue, have no other aim but to make others as wretched as themselves. Wherefore it is nothing wonderful, if they be generally troublesome and odious to their fellow man.”

— Baruch Spinoza

146. “He who hates anyone will endeavor to do him an injury, unless he fears that a greater injury will thereby accrue to himself; on the other hand, he who loves anyone will, by the same law, seek to benefit him.”

— Baruch Spinoza

147. “Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness.”

— Baruch Spinoza

148. “The greater emotion with which we conceive a loved object to be affected toward us, the greater will be our complacency.”

— Baruch Spinoza

149. “In proportion as we endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason, shall we strive as much as possible to depend less on hope, to liberate ourselves from fear, to rule fortune, and to direct our actions by the sure counsels of reason.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza