Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77,) Hebrew forename Baruch, Latin forename Benedictus, Portuguese Bento de Espinosa, was a Dutch-Jewish philosopher and theologian. One of the leading exponents of 17th-century Rationalism, he was one of the early and seminal figures of the Enlightenment. His masterwork is the treatise Ethics (1677.)
Born in Amsterdam, Spinoza was a descendant of Portuguese Jews who immigrated to the Netherlands to escape Catholic persecution. Spinoza studied Hebrew, the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the Kabbalah traditions of mysticism and miracle. He was fluent in five languages, but wrote in Latin, which he learned from Christian teachers who trained him in mathematics and philosophy.
By age 24, Spinoza had developed his philosophical ideas. He asserted that everything in the universe was made from the same divine substance and possessed infinite characteristics. He described the Christian God and the laws of nature as the same, a part of this “infinite substance.”
Spinoza’s beliefs were too radical from the prevailing idea of an omnipotent God, and, therefore, Spinoza was excommunicated. He left Amsterdam and supported himself grinding and polishing lenses while writing books of philosophy. He lived in solitude and studied the work of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, René Descartes, and Christiaan Huygens.
Spinoza withheld much of his work because he feared retribution from theologians who had openly accused him of atheism. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670, published anonymously) was a work of biblical criticism. It questioned revealed religion, opposed persecuting churches (including Calvinism,) and argued for religious freedom. Spinoza’s major work was Ethics; it was not published until after his death.
Until the end of the 18th century, Spinoza’s work was widely considered heretical and atheistic. His thinking underwent a revival, and he influenced philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Novalis, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Spinoza is now considered, along with René Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the great rationalist philosophers of the 17th century.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Baruch Spinoza
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
Topics: Excellence, Perfection
The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Love, Become
Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Self-Pity, Acceptance, Hedonism
The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
—Baruch Spinoza
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. As stars high above earth, you are above everything distressing. But you must awaken to it. Wake up!
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Earth, Sin, Live, Doing, Give, Stress
If you want the future to be different from the present, study the past.
—Baruch Spinoza
Desire is the very essence of man.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Desire
The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Men, Silence
We can always get along better by reason and love of truth than by worry of conscience and remorse. Harmful are these, and evil.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Worry, Managing Worries
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Philosophy, Religion
Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Speakers, Speaking, Difficulty
Will and intellect are one and the same.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Willpower, Will, Will Power
Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Welfare
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Unhappiness
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
Topics: Fame
We feel and know that we are eternal.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Immortality
I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Beauty
Perfect truth is possible only with knowledge, and in knowledge the whole essence of the thing operates on the soul and is joined essentially to it.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Truth
One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Realism, Music
Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
—Baruch Spinoza
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Hope
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: War, Peace, Absence, Justice
Faith is nothing but obedience and piety.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Faith, Belief
Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Thinking, Pride
We are so constituted by Nature that we easily believe the things we hope for, but believe only with difficulty those we fear, and that we regard such things more or less highly than is just. This is the source of the superstitions by which men everywhere are troubled. For the rest, I don’t think it worth the trouble to set out in detail here the vacillations of mind that stem from hope and fear – since it follows simply from the definition of these affects that there is no hope without fear, and no fear without hope (as I shall explain more fully in due course). Moreover, in hoping for or fearing something, we love it or hate it; so what I have said about love and hate can easily be applied to hope and fear.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Hope
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Understanding
Desire is the essence of a man.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Desires, Desire
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Love, Effort
Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Pleasure
The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Ignorance, Self-Discovery
The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal.
—Baruch Spinoza
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Anxiety, Hope, Fear
Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Humility
The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.
No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Government
Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Freedom
None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Flattery
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Understanding
What is called vainglory is self-satisfaction, nourished by nothing but the good opinion of the multitude, so that when that is withdrawn, the satisfaction, that is to say, the chief good which every one loves, ceases. For this reason those who glory in the good opinion of the multitude anxiously and with daily care strive, labour, and struggle to preserve their fame. For the multitude is changeable and fickle, so that fame, if it be not preserved, soon passes away. As every one, moreover, is desirous to catch the praises of the people, one person will readily destroy the fame of another; and, consequently, as the object of contention is what is commonly thought to be the highest good, a great desire arises on the part of every one to keep down his fellows by every possible means, and he who at last comes off conqueror boasts more because he has injured another person than because he has profited himself. This glory of self-satisfaction, therefore, is indeed vain, for it is really no glory.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Glory
Measure, time and number are nothing but modes of thought or rather of imagination.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Time
But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.
—Baruch Spinoza
Topics: Reality
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