83 quotes
Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.
Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677)
Perfection and imperfection are names which do not differ much from the names beauty and ugliness.
All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.
On the Improvement of the Understanding (1662)
We feel and experience ourselves to be eternal. (Latin: "Sentimus experimurque nos æternos esse.")
If anyone conceives that he is loved by another, and believes that he has given no cause for such love, he will love that other in return.
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity.
From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways—that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect.
Ethics Geometrically Demonstrated (1677)
The more we understand particular things, the more do we understand God.
The real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.
Theological-Political Treatise (1670)
Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity
Ethics (1677)
The eternal wisdom of God … has shown itself forth in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Jesus Christ.
God's will is eternal, and has never been indifferent; hence... the world is a necessary effect of the divine nature.
Simply from the fact that we have regarded a thing with the emotion of pleasure or pain, though that thing be not the efficient cause of the emotion, we can either love or hate it.
God is the Immanent Cause of all things, never truly transcendent from them
Ethics (1677)
The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.... We feel and know by experience that we are eternal.
Ethics (1677)
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.
Political Treatise (1677)
...it follows that everyone endeavors, as far as possible, to cause others to love what he himself loves, and to hate what he himself hates...
I must at this juncture declare that those doctrines which certain churches put forward concerning Christ, I neither affirm nor deny, for I freely confess that I do not grasp them.
Theologico-Political Treatise (1677)
If a man had begun to hate an object of his love, so that love is thoroughly destroyed, he will, causes being equal, regard it with more hatred than if he had never loved it, and his hatred will be in proportion to the strength of his former love.