Zitat des Tages von Baruch Spinoza:
Will and intellect are one and the same thing.
Whatsoever is contrary to nature is contrary to reason, and whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd.
We feel and know that we are eternal.
If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
Desire is the very essence of man.
None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.
Desire is the essence of a man.
Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.
So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.
It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.
Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.
The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.
I call him free who is led solely by reason.
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.
I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.
Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone.
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.
Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.
There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.
Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.