Top 200 Baruch Spinoza Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.”

— Baruch Spinoza

102. “If a man had begun to hate an object of his love, so that love is thoroughly destroyed, he will, causes being equal, regard it with more hatred than if he had never loved it, and his hatred will be in proportion to the strength of his former love.”

— Baruch Spinoza

103. “The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.”

— Baruch Spinoza

104. “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

105. “Men are especially intolerant of serving and being ruled by, their equals.”

— Baruch Spinoza

106. “If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

110. “Reason is no match for passion.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

113. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

115. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

123. “God is a thing that thinks.”

— Baruch Spinoza

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

127. “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

128. “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

129. “He who has a true idea, knows at that same time that he has a true idea, nor can he doubt concerning the truth of the thing.”

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

132. “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

133. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

137. “Everyone is by absolute natural right the master of his own thoughts, and thus utter failure will attend any attempt in a commonwealth to force men to speak only as prescribed by the sovereign despite their different and opposing opinions.”

— Baruch Spinoza

138. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.”

— Baruch Spinoza

145. “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

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

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

— Baruch Spinoza

149. “The superstitious, who know how to reprove vices rather than how to teach virtues, and who strive, not to lead people by reason, but to restrain them by fear in such a way that they flee what is bad rather than love the virtues, simply intend all other people to be as miserable as they are, and so it is not surprising that they are for the most part irksome and hateful to human beings.”

— Baruch Spinoza

150. “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