Baruch Spinoza - Ethics (1677)

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Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. 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
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Baruch Spinoza
Will and Intellect are one and the same thing.

Baruch Spinoza
None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

Baruch Spinoza
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
God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things, but also of their essence.
Corr. Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.

Baruch Spinoza
The mind can only imagine anything, or remember what is past, while the body endures.

Baruch Spinoza
Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

Baruch Spinoza
I understand that to be CAUSE OF ITSELF (causa sui) whose essence involves existence and whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing.

Baruch Spinoza
Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.

Baruch Spinoza
Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.

Baruch Spinoza
Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

Baruch Spinoza
This endeavor to do a thing or leave it undone, solely in order to please men, we call ambition, especially when we so eagerly endeavor to please the vulgar, that we do or omit certain things to our own or another's hurt: in other cases it is generally called kindliness.

Baruch Spinoza
It is of the nature of Reason to perceive things under a certain species of eternity [sub specie aeternitatis].

Baruch Spinoza
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
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
God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.

Baruch Spinoza
I refer those actions which work out the good of the agent to courage, and those which work out the good of others to nobility. Therefore temperance, sobriety, and presence of mind in danger, etc., are species of courage; but modesty, clemency, etc., are species of nobility.

Baruch Spinoza
Minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.

Baruch Spinoza
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
My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

Baruch Spinoza
I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes and solids.

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

Baruch Spinoza
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