311 Quotes by Baruch Spinoza

Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

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

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

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

Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.

Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

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.