Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinozawas a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin. By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth24 November 1632
philosophy views religion
Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.
integrity ethics
Let unswerving integrity be your watchword.
war philosophical character
Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
philosophical virtue reason
True virtue is life under the direction of reason.
men fancy fame
Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.
law wicked criminals
Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.
real liberty judgment
The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.
life pain hate
From what has been said we can clearly understand the nature of Love and Hate. Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause: Hate is nothing else but pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. We further see, that he who loves necessarily endeavors to have, and to keep present to him, the object of his love; while he who hates endeavors to remove and destroy the object of his hatred.
men hands excellent
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.
exercise men thinking
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.
simple numbers ideas
The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.
love-is ideas joy
Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause.
philosophical self ideas
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
To understand something is to be delivered of it.