My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things. - Benedictus de Spinoza

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

The first person ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us why Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last analysis this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading.

Every philosopher has two philosophies: his own and Spinoza's.