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Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.

Baruch Spinoza

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Baruch Spinoza
Age: 44 †
Born: 1632
Born: November 24
Died: 1677
Died: February 21
Bible Translator
Grammarian
Instrument Maker
Linguist
Optical Instrument Maker
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Theologian
Translator
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Benedict de Spinoza
Baruch de Espinosa
Barukh Shpinozah
Benoît de Spinoza
Sbīnūzā
Ispīnūzā
Barukh Spinoza
Bento de Espinosa
Baruch d' Espinoza
Shpinozah
Baruch de Spinoza
Spinoza
Benoit de Spinoza
Benedictus De Spinoza
Benedictus Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Benedictus de Spinoza
Write
Minds
Gratify
Cannot
Independent
Prescribe
Anything
Laws
Appease
Must
Opinion
Forbid
Writing
Law
Abide
Mind
Rather
Passed
Believe
Everyone
Anger
Men
Often
Atheism

More quotes by Baruch Spinoza

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The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it.
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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.
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The virtue of a free man appears equally great in refusing to face difficulties as in overcoming them.
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The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted not indeed by the avaricious, ... but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.
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God is a thing that thinks.
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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.
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Love is nothing but joy accompanied with the idea of an eternal cause.
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The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.
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The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.
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For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from force of character: for obedience is the constant will to execute what, by the general decree of the commonwealth, ought to be done.
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The less the mind understands and the more things it perceives, the greater its power of feigning is and the more things it understands, the more that power is diminished.
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As men's habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude ... that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits.
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Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's but under nature everything belongs to all.
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Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
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No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.
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Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
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Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.
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. . . to know the order of nature, and regard the universe as orderly is the highest function of the mind.
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Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature, and has regard to the course of nature as a whole, he can do nothing.
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Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.
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