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Laws directed against opinions affect the generous-minded rather than the wicked, and are adapted less for coercing criminals than for irritating the upright.

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
Opinion
Directed
Law
Minded
Rather
Affect
Less
Wicked
Opinions
Coercing
Criminals
Upright
Generous
Irritating
Laws
Adapted

More quotes by Baruch Spinoza

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To comprehend an idea, a person must simultaneously accept it as true. Conscious analysis - which, depending on the idea, may occur almost immediately or with considerable effort - allows the mind to reject what it intially accepted as fact.
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Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.
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I call him free who is led solely by reason.
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A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain.
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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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Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. [They are the two sides of a coin, so learning how to manage fear through learning, understanding, rationality, controlled imagination, preparation, mental focus (including distraction) and a gratitude attitude is very helpful.]
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The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.
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As though God had turned away from the wise, and written his decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind!
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What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.
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Reason connot defeat emotion, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger emotion.
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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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He, who knows how to distinguish between true and false, must have an adequate idea of true and false.
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If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil.
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God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
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Self-complacency is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause.
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Men are especially intolerant of serving and being ruled by, their equals.
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Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious.
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I make this chief distinction between religion and superstition, that the latter is founded on ignorance, the former on knowledge.
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Reality and perfection are synonymous.
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Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.
Baruch Spinoza