Baruch Spinoza - Ethics (1677)

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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
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 more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.

Baruch Spinoza
He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine.

Baruch Spinoza
Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.

Baruch Spinoza
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.

Baruch Spinoza
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
The mind has greater power over the emotions, and is less subject thereto, insofar as it understands all things to be necessary.

Baruch Spinoza
Men will find that they can prepare with mutual aid far more easily what they need, and avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides, by united forces.

Baruch Spinoza
In refusing benefits caution must be used lest we seem to despise or to refuse them for fear of having to repay them in kind.

Baruch Spinoza
Pride is therefore pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

Baruch Spinoza
Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.

Baruch Spinoza
That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature [Deus sive Natura], acts from the same necessity from which he exists.

Baruch Spinoza
Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

Baruch Spinoza
It therefore comes to pass that everyone is fond of relating his own exploits and displaying the strength both of his body and his mind, and that men are on this account a nuisance one to the other.

Baruch Spinoza
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
Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

Baruch Spinoza
He whose honor depends on the opinion of the mob must day by day strive with the greatest anxiety, act and scheme in order to retain his reputation. For the mob is varied and inconstant, and therefore if a reputation is not carefully preserved it dies quickly.

Baruch Spinoza
Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.

Baruch Spinoza
A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

Baruch Spinoza
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
He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return.

Baruch Spinoza
Avarice, ambition, lust, etc., are nothing but species of madness.

Baruch Spinoza
There is no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.

Baruch Spinoza
Anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic.

Baruch Spinoza
In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

Baruch Spinoza
He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false.

Baruch Spinoza
The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, it to understand things by intuition.

Baruch Spinoza
Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.

Baruch Spinoza
If we conceive that anyone loves, desires, or hates anything which we ourselves love, desire, or hate, we shall thereupon regard the thing in question with more steadfast love, etc. On the contrary, if we think that anyone shrinks from something that we love, we shall undergo vacillation of the soul.

Baruch Spinoza