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Ethics QUOTES

Ethics QUOTES

1 " Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

2 " The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men... "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

3 " I should attempt to treat human vice and folly geometrically... the passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from the necessity and efficacy of nature... I shall, therefore, treat the nature and strength of the emotion in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

4 " Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

5 " Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

6 " Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

7 " He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

8 " The order and connection of ideas in the same as the order and connection of things "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

9 " The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

10 " For though men be ignorant, yet they are men "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

11 " Most errors consist only in our not rightly applying names to things. For when someone says that the lines which are drawn from the center of a circle to its circumference are unequal, he surely understands (then at least) by a circle something different from what mathematicians understand. Similarly, when men err in calculating they have certain numbers in their mind and different ones on the paper. So if you consider what they have in mind, they really do not err, though they seem to err because we think they have in their mind the numbers which are on the paper. If this were not so, we would not believe that they were erring, just as I did not believe that he was erring whom I recently heard cry out that his courtyard had flown into his neighbor's hen, because what he had in mind seemed sufficiently clear to me.

And most controversies have arisen from this, that men do not rightly explain their own mind, or interpret the mind of the other man badly. For really, when they contradict one another most vehemently, they either have the same thoughts, or they are thinking of different things, so that what they think are errors and absurdities in the other are not. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

12 " Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

13 " It is the part of a wise man, I say, to refresh and restore himself in moderation with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of green plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theater, and other things of this kind, which anyone can use without injury to another. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

14 " Nothing forbids man to enjoy himself, save grim and gloomy superstition "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

15 " men, in so far as they live in obedience to reason necessarily do only such things as are necessarily good for human nature, and consequently for each individual man. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

16 " The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

17 " Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

18 " Joy is a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

19 " The body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things which its mind wonders at … it is in the mind’s power alone both to speak and to be silent and to do many other things which they therefore believe depend on the mind’s decision … if, on the other hand, the body is inactive, the mind is at the same time incapable of thinking "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics

20 " Benevolentia nihil aliud est, quam cupiditas ex commiseratione orta. "

― Baruch Spinoza , Ethics