Baruch Spinoza Quotes

Dutch - Philosopher November 24, 1632 - February 21, 1677

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

Baruch Spinoza

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Baruch Spinoza

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

Baruch Spinoza

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

Baruch Spinoza

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

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

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

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

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Baruch Spinoza

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

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Baruch Spinoza