Benedictus de Spinoza Quotes

Spinoza, as George Kline tells us, was a favorite with Russian Marxists: "Spinoza has received more attention from Soviet writers than any other pre-Marxian philosopher with the possible exception of Hegel" (Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952]). Even before the revolution, Plechanov, a founding father of Russian Marxism and of the Russian Social-Democratic party, took to Spinoza, considering that Marxism itself was a variety of Spinozism, or, a Spinozism stripped of its theological attire. A. M. Deborin, who quotes Plechanov on this point in his essay in Kline's collection, and also his contribution, "Spinozismus and Marxismus", in Chronicon Spinozanum 5 (1927), where he further quotes Plechanov, and declares that "Marxism, the leading revolutionary doctrine of the present, which is materialistic through and through, stems in its philosophical world-view from Spinozism". Deborin founded a whole school around this notion, and one of his colleagues even called Spinoza "Marx without a beard". Stalin later denounced this school — an ultima ratio in Soviet intellectual life — and it declined.

The superstitious, who know how to reprove vices rather than how to teach virtues, and who strive, not to lead people by reason, but to restrain them by fear in such a way that they flee what is bad rather than love the virtues, simply intend all other people to be as miserable as they are, and so it is not surprising that they are for the most part irksome and hateful to human beings.

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.

We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal.

[Spinoza] this pure soul, this great realist, the first human being to attempt to become a citizen of the world. . . this down-to-earth passion.

أوحي إلى نوح، بطريقةٍ على مستوى فَهْمه، بأنَّ الله سيُهلِك الجنس البشري. الواقع أنَّ نوحًا كان يَعتقِد أنَّ العالم كله، باستثناء فلسطين، لم يكُن مسكونًا، ولم يجهل الأنبياء مِثل هذه الأشياء فحسْب، بل جَهِلوا أيضًا أشياء أخرى كثيرةً أكثر أهمية، ولا يَنقُص جهلهم هذا من تقواهم شيئًا لأنهم لم يقولوا شيئًا خاصًّا يتعلَّق بصفات الله، بل كانت آراؤهم عنه هي بِعَينها الآراء المُتداولة، وكان الوحي الذي هبط عليهم مُتناسبًا مع آرائهم

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

Novalis was cried down as an enthusiastic mystic by the prosaic, and Spinoza as godless by the literalists. It was incumbent upon me to protest against this view of Spinoza, seeing I would review the whole sphere of piety. Something essential would have been wanting in the ex position of my views if I had not in some way said that the mind and heart of this great man seemed deeply influenced by piety, even though it were not Christian piety. The result might have been different, had not the Christianity of that time been so distorted and obscured by dry formulas and vain subtilties that the divine form could not be expected to win the regard of a stranger. This I said in the first edition, somewhat youthfully indeed, yet so that I have found nothing now needing to be altered, for there was no reason to believe that I ascribed the Holy Spirit to Spinoza in the special Christian sense of the word.

Right from the beginning, Spinoza was a decisive philosopher for Schelling. This may now sound like yet another dusty little truth in the museums and archives of philosophy, but in Schelling's day, to embrace Spinoza was to dance with the devil and pantheism was the witches' brew served at this demonic party. [...] Now as bored college students sleep through class lectures and discussions on Continental Rationalism, it seems hard to imagine why Spinoza feared for his life were he to publish his Ethics, or why people were punished for reading it, or why records were kept of those who had read it in a way not altogether dissimilar to the way the FBI now keeps records on terrorists or even its own citizens.

Nature as conceived by many ecologists, and expressed philosophically by James Lovelock and others, is not the passive, dead, value-neutral nature of mechanistic science but is akin to the active, "naturing" nature of Spinoza. It is all-inclusive, creative (as natura naturans), infinitely diverse, and alive in the broad sense of Spinozistic so-called panpsychism.

Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1831

The fundamental principle of the atheism of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere. There is only one substance, says he, in the world; and that substance is perfectly simple and indivisible, and exists every where, without any local presence. Whatever we discover externally by sensation; whatever we feel internally by reflection; all these are nothing but modifications of that one, simple, and necessarily existent being, and are not possest of any separate or distinct existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere.

ceux que l’on croit être le plus pleins de mésestime d’eux-mêmes et d’humilité, sont généralement le plus pleins d’ambition et d’envie

It was not until the Twelfth Century of our era that the Pentateuch as a whole was subjected to rational scrutiny. The man who undertook the ungrateful task was a learned Spanish rabbi, Abraham ben Meir ibn Esra. He unearthed many absurdities, but... it was not until five hundred years later that anything properly describable as scientific criticism... came into being. Its earliest shining lights were the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes [with his Leviathan], and the Amsterdam Jew, Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-politicus", published in 1670, made the first really formidable onslaught upon the inspired inerrancy of the Pentateuch. It called attention to scores of transparent imbecilities … including a dozen or more palpable geographical and historical impossibilities … The answer of constituted authorities was to suppress the "Tractatus", but enough copies got out to reach the proper persons, and ever since then the Old Testament has been under searching and devastating examination.

Well before John Stuart Mill, Spinoza had the acuity to recognize that the unfettered freedom of expression is in the state's own best interest. In this post-9/11 world, there is a temptation to believe that “homeland security” is better secured by the suppression of certain liberties than their free exercise. This includes a tendency by justices to interpret existing laws in restrictive ways and efforts by lawmakers to create new limitations, as well as a willingness among the populace, “for the sake of peace and security,” to acquiesce in this. We seem ready not only to engage in a higher degree of self-censorship, but also to accept a loosening of legal protections against prior restraint (whether in print publications or the dissemination of information via the Internet), unwarranted surveillance, unreasonable search and seizure, and other intrusive measures. Spinoza, long ago, recognized the danger in such thinking, both for individuals and for the polity at large. He saw that there was no need to make a trade-off between political and social well-being and the freedom of expression; on the contrary, the former depends on the latter.