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Quotes

Baruch Spinoza


(1632 - 1677)

Dutch philosopher.


Quotations of Baruch Spinoza

"Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / Theological Political Treatise / 1670)

"Philosophy has no end in view, save truth. Faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / Theological-Political Treatise / 1670)

"Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd, and, ipso facto, to be rejected."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / Theological-Political Treatise / 1670)

"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / letter to friend / 1670)

"God or nature"
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / Ethics / 1677)

"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 / 1632-1677 / Ethics / 1677)

"God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / Ethics / 1677)

"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 / 1632-1677 / Ethics / 1677)

"I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677 / Epistles)

"The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677)

"A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain."
(Baruch Spinoza / 1632-1677)


Biography of Baruch Spinoza



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