42 Quotes About Spinoza

Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection.

... The power which the common people ascribe to God is not only a human power (which shows that they look upon God as a man, or as being like a man), but that it also involves weakness.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men...

Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief two hundred pages a man has written down his lifetime's thought with stoic sculptury of everything superfluous.

In the event things got worse, and Spinoza gave up the idea of publishing the Ethics, believing that it would create such a cloud of hostility as to obscure, in the minds even of reasonable people, the real meaning of its arguments. Meanwhile, the book was read attentively, and at least one club existed for the express purpose of working through its proofs.

Throughout the proofs of the Ethics, therefore, the reader can never be certain whether the extraordinary ideas which are brought so compellingly before him are fiction or reality.

Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition

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