Spinoza Quotes
More Spinoza Quotes
The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart — the difference between theory and experience.
martin esslin— Introduction : The absurdity of the Absurd
My views are near to those of Spinoza : admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem — the most important of all human problems.
Albert Einstein— In a letter to Murray W. Gross (26 April 1947), quoted in Einstein and Religion (1999).
The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, … Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. … The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.
julien benda— p. 159 (Treason of the Intellectuals (1927))
Spinoza saw... that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, "I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second."
— "The Android and the Human" (1972), reprinted in The Dark-Haired Girl (1988) and in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995), ed. Lawrence Sutin
Philosophers have always tried to show that we are not like other animals, sniffing their way uncertainly through the world. Yet after all the work of Plato and Spinoza , Descartes and Bertrand Russell we have no more reason than other animals do for believing that the sun will rise tomorrow.
john n. gray— The Deception: Animal Faith (p.55)
Spinoza , for example, thought that insight into the essence of reality, into the harmonious structure of the eternal universe, necessarily awakens love for this universe. For him, ethical conduct is entirely determined by such insight into nature, just as our devotion to a person may be determined by insight into his greatness or genius. Fears and petty passions, alien to the great love of the universe, which is logos itself, will vanish, according to Spinoza, once our understanding of reality is deep enough.
max horkheimer— p. 14 (Eclipse of Reason (1947))
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza 's God, it won't love us in return.
bertrand russell— Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, March, 1912,The above proposition is occasionally useful.as quoted in Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2012), p. 1318.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza , is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
george santayana— "On My Friendly Critics"
Of all heroes , Spinoza was Einstein 's greatest. No one expressed more strongly then he a belief in the harmony , the beauty , and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature .
john archibald wheeler— "Albert Einstein in Biographical Memoirs, Vol. 51, published by the National Academy of Sciences
States should practice multilateralism and abandon unilateral actions that adversely affect a democratic and equitable international order, refraining from the threat or use of force. They should apply international law uniformly, abandon overreliance on “positivism” and efforts to circumvent treaty obligations or invent loopholes. As “nature abhors a vacuum” (Spinoza, Ethics), human rights law abhors “legal black holes”
alfred de zayas— United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order [23]
My views are near to those of Spinoza : admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem the most important of all human problems.
Albert Einstein— In a letter to Murray W. Gross (26 April 1947), quoted in Einstein and Religion (1999).
Atheists are confounded with Pantheists, such as Xenophanes among the ancients, or Spinoza and Schelling among the moderns, who, instead of denying God, absorb everything into him.
— p. 52 ; reported in: S. Austin Allibone, Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Spinoza does not, like the Stoics, object to all emotions; he objects only to those that are "passions," i.e., those in which we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces. … Understanding that all things are necessary helps the mind to acquire power over the emotions.
bertrand russell— A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book Three, Part I, Chapter X, Spinoza, p. 575
I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza : that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by "instinct." Not only is his overtendency like mine namely to make all knowledge the most powerful affect but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Postcard to Franz Overbeck, Sils-Maria (30 July 1881) as translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (1954).
In the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century Spinoza even became the secular saint of a kind of mystical pantheist deism for authors like Goethe, Schelling, and Coleridge.
— Aaron V. Garrett, Meaning in Spinoza's Method (2003), p. 2.
[Malebranche] teaches that we see all things in God himself. This is certainly equivalent to explaining something unknown by something even more unknown. Moreover, according to him, we see not only all things in God, but God is also the sole activity therein, so that physical causes are so only apparently; they are merely occasional causes. ( Recherches de la vérité , Livre VI, seconde partie, chap. 3.) And so here we have essentially the pantheism of Spinoza who appears to have learned more from Malebranche than from Descartes.
Arthur Schopenhauer— Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, "Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real".
