Baruch Spinoza Quotes

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.

The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things

Every person should embrace those [dogmas] that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen in him love of justice.

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....you are above everything distressing.

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

It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another.

I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them.

After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.

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

those, who are believed to be most self—abased and humble, are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious

Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.

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

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

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