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Baruch Spinoza Quotes - Page 9

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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.

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
Men, Hands, Excellent
Ethics pt. 5 (1677) (translation by Edwin Curley)

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Baruch Spinoza
Simple, Ideas, Numbers
Baruch Spinoza (2015). “Ethics”, p.101, Baruch Spinoza

The safest way for a state is to lay down the rule that religion is comprised solely in the exercise of charity and justice, and that the rights of rulers in sacred, no less than in secular matters, should merely have to do with actions, but that every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.

Baruch Spinoza
Exercise, Men, Thinking
"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" by Baruch Spinoza, ch. 20, 1677.

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
Life, Pain, Hate
Baruch Spinoza (1981). “Ethics”, p.108, Commodius Vicus

As though God had turned away from the wise, and written his decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!

Baruch Spinoza
Wise, Inspiration, Men
"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus". Book by Baruch Spinoza, Preface, 1677.

Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.

Baruch Spinoza
Evil, Causes, Omen

But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.

Baruch Spinoza
Reality, Men, Giving

I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge.

Baruch Spinoza
Ignorance, Superstitions, Latter
Baruch Spinoza (2014). “Letters to Friend and Foe”, p.15, Open Road Media

No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.

Baruch Spinoza
Words Of Wisdom, Doubt, Body

Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it.

Baruch Spinoza
Love, Life, Hatred