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
men careers giving
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.
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.
moving men mind
As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits.
men law mind
Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.
thinking littles ordinary
The multitude always strains after rarities and exceptions, and thinks little of the gifts of nature; so that, when prophecy is talked of, ordinary knowledge is not supposed to be included. Nevertheless it has as much right as any other to be called Divine.
mind wish lasts
In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.
men sides action
Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action.
beauty beautiful nature
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.
silence peter
What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.
freedom determined action
Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
men essence desire
Desire is the essence of a man.