Desire is the actual essence of man, in so far as it is conceived, as determined to a particular activity by some given modification of itself. - Benedictus de Spinoza

I love our old Chuang-tzu because I love his pantheism, because he got a living by making straw shoes. I love the Dutchman Spinoza because I love his pantheism, because he got a living by grinding lenses. I love the Indian Kabir because I love his pantheism, because he got a living by knotting fishing-nets.

...So when you play five notes, if each note had a big ego it would want to be louder than the note before. And therefore I learned from this very simple fact, that no matter how great an individual you are, music teaches you that the creativity only work in groups, and the expression of the group is very often larger than the sum of the parts. And you can draw whatever conclusions you want from this, but I think that this is a not unimportant factor. And maybe in a strange way I've found some answers to all this, not in music but in philosophy, especially from reading regularly and for many years the Ethics of Spinoza. Spinoza was a religious scholar, a political architect, a philosopher, who aspired to geometric demonstration of the universe and the human being in it, and he was a biological thinker who advanced the science of emotion. And there lies of course one of the great difficulties of making music, the science of emotion.

Can any one doubt that if the noblest saint among the Buddhists, the best Mahometan, the highest Stoic of Athens, the purest and wisest Christian, — Buddha and Menu in India, Confucius in China, Spinoza in Holland, could somewhere meet and converse, — they would all find themselves of one religion, — would find themselves denounced by their own sects, and sustained by these believed adversaries of their sects.