"The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free."
"Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious."
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Source: Political Treatise by Baruch Spinoza, translated by A. H. Gosset, (Ch. 1), 1883.
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