{"author":"Baruch Spinoza","author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza","total_quotes":82,"quotes":[{"text":"I shall treat the nature and power of the Affects, and the power of the Mind over them, by the same Method by which, in the preceding parts, I treated God and the Mind, and I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a Question of lines, planes, and bodies.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["bodies","emotions","extension","god","human-being","mathematics","mind","natural-laws","nature","passions","thought","world"],"id":6960,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"Do not weep do not wax indignant. Understand. ","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["understand","wax","indignant "],"id":7267,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["beauty","beautiful "],"id":9266,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["epistemology","metaphysics","mind","philosophy","spinoza","truth"],"id":22777,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["happiness","mind","understanding"],"id":26297,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["education","free-thought","philosophy"],"id":32560,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"All laws which can be violated without doing any one any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of men that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men's thoughts the more toward those very objects, for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden... He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["anarchy","coercion","drugs","ethics","freedom","government","immorality","legality","libertarian","liberty","morality","prohibition","regulations","state","statism","voluntaryism","war"],"id":59239,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["philosophy"],"id":61254,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"Most of those who have written about the Affects, and men’s way of living, seem to treat, not of natural things, which follow the common laws of nature, but of things that are outside nature. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["action","god","human-being","natural-laws","nature","passions","volition-dominion","will"],"id":64296,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"},{"text":"Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.","author":"Baruch Spinoza","tags":["freedom","progress","liberal "],"id":66319,"author_id":"Baruch+Spinoza"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":82,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}