Schelling calls Spinoza "the first philosopher who found the concepts whereby all the following centuries have grasped and fixed the two extremities … - Benedictus de Spinoza

The Ethics is a book of concepts (the second kind of knowledge), but also of affects (the first kind) and percepts (the third kind) too. Thus the paradox in Spinoza is that he's the most philosophical of philosophers, the purest in some sense, but also the one who more than any other addresses non-philosophers and calls forth the most intense non-philosophical understanding. That is why absolutely anyone can read Spinoza, and be very moved, or see things quite differently afterward, even if they can hardly understand Spinoza's concepts. Conversely, a historian of philosophy who understands only Spinoza's concepts doesn't fully understand him.

...The most terrifying affirmations, like that of Clement of Alexandria who declares that "Matter is eternal," are drawn from a treasury of the philosophical propositions that most tantalized Flaubert, above all those of Spinoza, for whom his admiration was unlimited, the Spinoza of the Ethics and particularly of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. If we had the time, we could uncover a panoply of Spinozisms in the devil's discourse at the end of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. This discourse is not purely Spinozist: it is not homogeneous in this respect, but it has recourse to recognizable schemata from the Ethics. The devil, to be sure, is no atheist; no one is less atheist than the devil. But he does not deny God's extension and therefore his substance any more than Spinoza does; [...] The devil is no more an atheist than Spinoza, and Flaubert says that all those who "accuse" Spinoza of atheism are "asses". But he plays this Spinoza off against religion and its forms of imagination, against the illusions of figures in the politics of religion; and in this regard, the Tractatus Theologico-politicus is even more important than the Ethics. Flaubert discovered the Tractatus in 1870, while he was working on the Temptation. The book, he says, "dazzles" and "astounds" him; he is "transported with admiration." In a moment, I will venture a hypothesis on the privileged place of Spinoza in Flaubert's library or philosophical dictionary, as well as in his company of philosophers, for his first impulse is always one of admiration for Spinoza the man ("My God, what a man! what an intellect! what learning and what a mind!" "What a genius!"). [...] With this gesture, Flaubert also shows himself to be Nietzsche's brother.

In so far as we understand, we can desire nothing but that which must be, nor, in an absolute sense, can we find contentment in anything but truth.