"Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy."
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Baruch Spinoza quotes (page 3 of 12)
223 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues."
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"We must take care not to admit as true anything, which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow."
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"If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil."
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"Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind."
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"Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things."
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"Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts."
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"Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause."
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"Sadness diminishes a man's powers"
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"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."
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"Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others."
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"A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil."
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"Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character."
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"Everyone endeavors as much as possible to make others love what he loves, and to hate what he hates... This effort to make everyone approve what we love or hate is in truth ambition, and so we see that each person by nature desires that other persons should live according to his way of thinking."
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"The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting."
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"The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature."
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"There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope."
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"God is not He who is, but That which is."
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"Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace."
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