Spinoza Quotes

• 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

  Atheist, Men, Insightful

  Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies "On My Friendly Critics" (1922)

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• The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

  Albert Einstein

  Religious, Atheist, Teaching

  Albert Einstein (1995). “Ideas and Opinions”, Three Rivers Press

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• I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)

  Albert Einstein

  Believe, Fate, World

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.325, Princeton University Press

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• I can understand your aversion to the use of the term 'religion' to describe an emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself most clearly in Spinoza... I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason.

  Albert Einstein

  Religious, Attitude, Reality

  "Einstein and Oppenheimer". Book by Silvan S. Schweber, Harvard University Press, p. 291, 2009.

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• I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things

  Albert Einstein

  Two, Soul, Body

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.152, Princeton University Press

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• It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order 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

  Believe, Views, Order

  "Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology". Book by Max Jammer, 1995.

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• 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

  Hero, Belief, Harmony

  "Albert Einstein". "Biographical Memoirs" Vol. 51, National Academy of Sciences, 1980.

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• All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.

  Heinrich Heine

  Eyeglasses, Knowing, Lenses

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• 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

  Math, Science, Return

  Bertrand Russell (1992). “The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The private years, 1884-1914”, Allen Lane

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• 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

  Causes, Pantheism, Occasional

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• I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality. 'I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.' That means for me more Spinoza than the prophets.

  Albert Einstein

  Hate, Mean, Loving You

  Letter to Michele Besso, January 6, 1948.

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• Truth and Beauty (perhaps Keats was wrong in identifying them: perhaps they have the relation of Wit and Humour, or Rain and Rainbow) are of interest only to hungry people. There are several kinds of hunger. If Socrates, Spinoza, and Santayana had had free access to a midnight icebox we would never have heard of them. Shall I be ashamed of my little mewing truths?... I ask to be forgiven: they are such tiny ones.

  Christopher Morley

  Philosophy, Rain, People

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• No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

  Christopher Hitchens

  Gone, Way, Gulags

  "Christopher Hitchens: Religion Poisons Everything". Interview with Jon Wiener, www.truthdig.com. June 7, 2007.

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• the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. [He] falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter, or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Falling In Love, Men

  T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.127, Courier Corporation

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• The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

  Gilles Deleuze

  Philosophy, Fighting, Men

  Gilles Deleuze, FeÌl?ix Guattari (2004). “Anti-Oedipus”, p.31, A&C Black

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• When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

  Christopher Hitchens

  May, Woody, Messiah

  Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.59, Basic Books

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• All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.

  Edward Abbey

  Brother, Men, Secret

  Edward Abbey (1996). “The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader”, p.109, Macmillan

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• A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

  Gertrude Stein

  Plato, Philosophy, Psychology

  "Voices: A Memoir". Book by Frederic Prokosch, 1983.

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• 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

  Beautiful, Struggle, Passion

  "Treason of the Intellectuals". Book by Julien Benda, p. 159, 1927.

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• The great Jewish scientists and philosophers of the last few generations - Spinoza, Einstein, Freud, Robert Oppenheimer and others - were natives of Europe and America.

  David Ben-Gurion

  Europe And America, Generations, Lasts

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• 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

  Passion, Reality, Greatness

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.9, A&C Black

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• The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.

  Moses Hess

  Teaching, Historical, Age

  Moses Hess (1943). “The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question”, p.138, U of Nebraska Press

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• All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.

  Will Durant

  Plato, Home, Thinking

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• There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.

  Murray Bookchin

  Writing, Simple, Numbers

  Source: reason.com

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• 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

  Ideas, Differences, Intuition

  Martin Esslin (2009). “The Theatre of the Absurd”, p.25, Vintage

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