I practice Spinoza, I read and read it again, and wait with longing for the fight over his corpse. I abstain from all judgment, but I confess that I … - Benedictus de Spinoza

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

Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes. There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides mathematics, which might have caused men's minds to be directed to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge of the truth.

After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile, and
when I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them; I determined at last to inquire whether
there was anything which might be truly good, and able to communicate its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all other things; I determined, I say, to inquire whether I might discover and attain the
faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continual supreme happiness..
I could see the many advantages acquired from honor and riches, and that I should be debarred from acquiring these things if I wished seriously to investigate a new matter…But the more one possesses of either of them, the more the pleasure is increased, and the more one is in con-
sequence encouraged to increase them; whereas if at any time our hope is frustrated, there arises in us the deepest pain. Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we
must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what pleases
them. . .. But the love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with a pleasure secure from all pain… The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the
mind has with the whole of nature….The more the mind knows, the better it understands its forces and the order of
nature; the more it understands its forces or strength, the better it will be able to direct itself and lay down the rules for itself; and the more it understands the order of nature,
the more easily it will be able to liberate itself from useless things; this is the whole method.