Top 200 Baruch Spinoza Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Reason is no match for passion.”

— Baruch Spinoza

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

107. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

122. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

126. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

134. “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

135. “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

136. “Ceremonies are no aid to blessedness.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

138. “In a state of nature nothing can be said to be just or unjust; this is so only in a civil state, where it is decided by common agreement what belongs to this or that man.”

— Baruch Spinoza

139. “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

140. “I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.”

— Baruch Spinoza

141. “The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure.”

— Baruch Spinoza

142. “Indeed, just as light makes manifest both itself and darkness, so truth is the standard both of itself and falsity.”

— Baruch Spinoza

143. “Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.”

— Baruch Spinoza

144. “The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.”

— Baruch Spinoza

145. “It is sure that those are most desirous of honour or glory who cry out loudest of its abuse and the vanity of the world.”

— Baruch Spinoza

146. “It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.”

— Baruch Spinoza

147. “To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.”

— Baruch Spinoza

148. “He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza