"Spinoza" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Iamblichus Hypatia Diogenes Quintus Sextus Ovid Plutarch Seneca Apollonius The Apostles Matthew James James the Less Peter The Christian Fathers Clement Tertullian Origen Chrysostom St. Francis d'Assisi Cornaro Leonardo da Vinci Milton Locke Spinoza Voltaire Pope Gassendi Swedenborg Thackeray Linnaeus Shelley Lamartine Michelet William Lambe Sir Isaac Pitman Thoreau Fitzgerald Herbert Burrows Garibaldi Wagner Edison Tesla Marconi Tolstoy George Frederick Watts ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... literature is confined within its own borders. It is especially strange that, although Holland possesses a most abundant literature, it has not, as other little states, produced one book that has become European, unless we class among literary works the writings of Spinoza, the only great philosopher of his country, or consider as Dutch literature the forgotten Latin treatises of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Yet if there be a country which by its nature and history suggests subjects ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... beliefs regarding the Pentateuch The book of Genesis Doubt thrown on the sacred theory by Aben Ezra By Carlstadt and Maes Influence of the discovery that the Isidorian Decretals were forgeries That the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite were serious Hobbes and La Peyrere Spinoza Progress of biblical criticism in France.—Richard Simon LeClerc Bishop Lowth Astruc Eichhorn's application of the "higher criticism" to biblical research Isenbiehl Herder Alexander Geddes Opposition to the higher criticism in Germany Hupfeld Vatke and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... bridle in the mouth of France. She established colonies in America and in the East Indies. With her celebrated new university of Leyden, with {276} publicists like Grotius, theologians like Jansen, painters like Van Dyke and Rembrandt, philosophers like Spinoza, she took the lead in many of the fields of thought. Her material and spiritual power, her tolerance and freedom, became the envy of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... that leads from Leiden to Katwyk-aan-Zee passes the houses of Descartes and Spinoza; and altogether the short journey by water did not lack interest, for Katwyk has become a colony of artists. Once there, we walked to the sluice where the Rhine seeks its grave in the North Sea; and as it happened that the tide was high, with a strong shore wind, I could ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... does but defeat its own end. And, stoically speaking, does it much matter? Posterity has done just as well without the transmission of the real Cardinal Hippolytus; and we know that everything always comes right if only we look at it, Spinoza-like, "under the category of the eternal." But we, meanwhile, are not eternal, nor, alas! are our friends; and that is just one of the things which gall us. We cannot believe—how could we?—that the future can have its own witty men and gracious women, its ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... believe in Christianity. It is the only spiritual food which God in his wisdom has placed within their reach. But if we once begin to think of modern heathenism, and how certain tenets of Lao-tse resemble the doctrines of Comte or Spinoza, our equanimity, our historical justice, our Christian charity, are gone. We become advocates wrangling for victory—we are no longer tranquil observers, compassionate friends and teachers. Mr. Hardwick sometimes addresses himself to men like Lao-tse or Buddha, who are now dead and gone more ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... when pressed, they mean by that name "everything"—God is everything. The term "Pantheist" is from pan, all, and theos, God. Webster defines the term thus: "One that believes the universe to be God; a name given to the followers of Spinoza." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... resemblance, and others equally marked of difference. We see their differences most strikingly in their descendants. From Bacon lineally descended Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Cabanis, and our Scotch school. From Descartes descended Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The inductive method predominated in one school, the deductive in the other. These differences we shall recognize more fully later on; at present we may fix our minds on the two great points of resemblance: 1st, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... earliest to be found in "Ritter and Preller," through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas, to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism and Nominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yet again on to James and Bergson—all inevitably work out to this, that the Universal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as he apprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to some corresponding harmony within himself. Lacking ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... our affliction. Great orators are the creatures of popular assemblies; we were permitted only by stealth to meet even in our temples. And as for great writers, the catalogue is not blank. What are all the schoolmen, Aquinas himself, to Maimonides? And as for modern philosophy, all springs from Spinoza. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... chance is explained and the other is thereby seen more closely. Let us consider a few of these and other definitions. Aristotle says that the accidental occurs, , according to nature. Epicurus, who sees the creation of the world as a pure accident, holds it to occur <gr tuchs, ta de par hmwn>. Spinoza believes nothing to be contingent save only according to the limitations of knowledge; Kant says that conditioned existence as such, is called accidental; the unconditioned, necessary. Humboldt: "Man sees those things as accident which he can not explain genetically.'' Schiel: "Whatever may not ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... of which are by Toland, the other two and the preface by Holbach and Naigeon. The matters treated are, the origin of prejudices, the dogma of the immortality of the soul, idolatry, superstition, the system of Spinoza and the origin of movement ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... in German letters was the great festival at Mainz in honor of Gutenberg and his invention of the art of printing. Froebel opened his first kindergarten at Blankenburg in Thuringia. Auerbach, the popular novelist, brought out his "Spinoza." Much was made by Germans of the opening of the first railway between Dresden and Leipzig, and of the invention of coal-tar colors, or aniline dyes, by a process destined to revolutionize the arts of coloring and dyeing throughout the world. A great stir ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... development of a religious faith and prevent the discovery of a new truth. Zen needs no Inquisition. It never compelled nor will compel the compromise of a Galileo or a Descartes. No excommunication of a Spinoza or the burning of a Bruno is possible ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... schoolboy was, I think, really the attitude of the best minds then and onwards to Descartes and Spinoza. They gave themselves up to the study of nature without ceasing to belong to their school, yet freed, as on a holiday, from the constraint of being actually in it. Yet, in regard to their personal and social life, at least north of the Alps, the ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... indulgence, even in food, not necessary to health and strength, he condemns as immoral. All gratifications except those of the affections, are to be tolerated only as "inevitable infirmities." Novalis said of Spinoza that he was a God-intoxicated man: M. Comte is a morality-intoxicated man. Every question with him is one of morality, and no motive but that of morality ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... his appreciating the biologically oriented thought of Aristotle. Instead, Boyle talked about the inorganic world, of water, of metals and elements, of physical properties. He ignored that inner drive which Spinoza called the conatus; or the seeds of Paracelsus or van Helmont; or the persistence over a time course of any "essence" or "form." Since he dealt with phenomena relatively simple when compared with living phenomena, he could, for this very reason, make progress, ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... distorted by the old party spirit, there is yet a clearer recognition than of old, that widely-spread discontent is not a reason for arbitrary suppression, but for seeking to understand and remove its causes. We should act in the spirit of Spinoza's great saying; and it should be our aim, as it was his care, "neither to mock, to bewail, nor to denounce men's actions, but to understand them". That is equally true of men's opinions. If they are violent, passionate, subversive of all order, our duty ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... little Spinoza and Plutarch, I have read nothing since my return, as I am quite occupied by my present work. It is a task that will take me up to the end of July. I am in a hurry to be through with it, so as to abandon myself to the extravagances of the good Saint-Antoine, but ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he doubted, but ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... are both engaged together in these intellectual labours. We build up a pile, having for its base some slender modern metaphysician, ill able (poor man!) to sustain such a weight of philosophy. Upon this we place the Dutch quartos of Descartes and Spinoza; then a third story of Schoolmen in folio—the Master of Sentences, Suarez, Picus Mirandula, and the Telemonian bulk of Thomas Aquinas; and when the whole architecture seems firm and compact, we finish our system of metaphysics by ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the opinion of two Hebrew commentators, Abenezra and Spinoza, upon this subject; they both say that the book of Job carries no internal evidence of being an Hebrew book; that the genius of the composition, and the drama of the piece, are not Hebrew; that it has been translated from another language into Hebrew, and that the author of the book was a Gentile; ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... doctrine, like that of Greek philosophy or of Spinoza, consists always in substituting for reality, by simplification, ideas or concepts which they think statically in their logical relations, regarding them at the same time as adequate representations and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... possible from being what Spinoza has been called, "a God-intoxicated man." Real reverence for sacred things did not enter into his mental equipment. A story illustrating his lack of reverence for what he called "long-faced" brethren was told by J. M. Grant in Salt ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... treatises. But there is nothing to prevent him from making his aim, not so much pleasure, as self-preservation; or from taking as his goal wealth, power, reputation, intellectual or moral attainment, or what not. [Footnote: Thus, Hobbes made his end self-preservation; Spinoza takes much the same position; Nietzsche makes that which is aimed ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... burning pile, cheering His confessors and His martyrs, soothing the anguish of their pains, and filling their hearts with His peace. His the impulse which spoke in the thunder of Savonarola, which guided the calm wisdom of Erasmus, which inspired the deep ethics of the God-intoxicated Spinoza. His the energy which impelled Roger Bacon, Galileo, and Paracelsus in their searchings into nature. His the beauty that allured Fra Angelica and Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, that inspired the genius of Michelangelo, that shone before the eyes of Murillo, and that gave the power that raised ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... If Spinoza's dictum be true, that "a wise man's meditation is not of death but of life," then Andreyev is surely not a wise man. Some philosophers might have written their works even without a guarantee against immortality, though Schopenhauer, who exercised ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... spent between twelve and thirteen years at the universities of Europe before he began to preach. Arminius died at fifty-nine. Yet he left behind him a work on divinity which ranks him with La Place and Newton, with Calvin and Augustine and Spinoza, as one of the world's master minds. Calvin spent nine years at college, and later was able to devote three years more to study. Augustine devoted thirteen years to study after his father sent him away to college before he accepted the professorship ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... observing and analysing facts; that this boldness toward facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual emancipation of the human intellect. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... philosophy; the works of Campanella and Vanini (Bruno much later, for his works were then exceeding rare. I now have Weber's edition), and also, with intense relish and great profit, an old English version of Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In which last work I had the real key and clue to all German philosophy and Rationalism, as I in time found out. I must here modestly mention that I had, to a degree which I honestly believe ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... superstition, and whose dagger still rusts in the heart of Catholicism—all the priests who have been translated have their happiness increased by looking at Voltaire. Glorious country where the principal occupation is watching the miseries of the lost. Geordani Bruno, Benedict Spinoza, Diderot, the encyclopedist, who endeavored to get all knowledge in a small compass so that he could put the peasant on an equality with the prince intellectually; the man who wished to sow all over the world ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... compares Newton with Spinoza. In the first place, there is no ground of parallel. Newton was a very great man and a very justly celebrated mathematician. As a matter of fact, he is not celebrated for having discovered the law of gravitation. ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... little interest, and indeed at that time it scarcely could be reckoned among the ordinary subjects of education; philosophy he pursued rather as a man than as a student, and we are not surprised to find that it was Spinoza rather than Kant or Fichte or Hegel to whom he devoted most attention, for he cared more for principles of belief and the conduct of life than ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... everything, my dear sir!" said he, laying on the table a volume containing Spinoza's works. "How could so well organized a ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... was a being animated by a principle which gave to it motion, form and life. This principle they called the soul of the universe. This idea was advocated by the followers of Plotinus, who contended that this soul of the world animated the smallest particle of matter. Spinoza asserted that all things were alive in different degrees. Matter, according to Leibnitz and Boscovish, and others, is always endowed with force. Attraction and repulsion and chemical affinity, all indicate ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... without the constant and increasing aid of other minds and the inspiring "spirit of the age"; the enjoyment of such knowledge is in an even wider communication. The practice and enjoyment of the arts of goodness are necessarily social, because the good life can only be lived in a good society. Spinoza has summed up the truth in saying—"The highest good is common to all, and all may equally enjoy it." So it appears that the highest goods are essentially at once individual and social, pointing ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... protective brushes of hair. It is far from the intention of these pages to enter upon a general refutation of this theory of adaptation. Indeed there is scarcely anything essential to be added to the many admirable remarks that have been made upon this subject since the time of Spinoza. But this may be remarked, that I regard it as one of the most important services of the Darwinian theory that it has deprived those considerations of usefulness which are still undeniable in the domain of life, of their mystical supremacy. In the case before us it ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... of the seven sages; Solon, the second founder of Athens, and Hyperates, the mathematician, were all traders. Plato, called the Divine by reason of the excellence of his wisdom, defrayed his traveling expenses in Egypt by the profits derived from the oil which he sold during his journey. Spinoza maintained himself by polishing glasses while he pursued his philosophical investigations. Linnaeus, the great botanist, prosecuted his studies while hammering leather and making shoes. Shakespeare was the successful manager of ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... worship for a number of years; but its fantastic nature seems to have dawned on him at last, and he gave it up for a still simpler creed consisting merely in reverence for the Deity and in respect for the moral law. In the matter of public worship he was of the same opinion as Spinoza and many other philosophers. He esteemed public worship salutary for the state, and paid an annual subscription to the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia; but he also esteemed it his privilege to stay away from service, and indulged in this privilege to the full, making Sunday his chief ...
— Benjamin Franklin • Paul Elmer More
... play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter. In the actual life of man, sorrow, as Spinoza says somewhere, is a passage to a lesser perfection. But the sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates, if I may quote once more from the great art critic of the Greeks. It is through Art, and through Art ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... perhaps, possible only under a Grecian sky, and it is, in its better parts, scholarly in the best sense of the word.[1] It shows that he has read out-of-the-way books, like Bodinus "De Republica," and fresh ones, like Gladstone's Homer,—that he can do justice, with Spinoza, to Machiavelli,—and that in letters, at least, he has no narrow prejudices. Its sentences are full of scholarly allusion, and its language glitters continually with pattins of bright gold from Shakspeare. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... seek the true motive force of the man or woman, who may be a most excellent person, one who lays, indeed, emphatically and honestly, the greatest stress on the value of the impulses of Morality. "The passions are the winds which fill the sails of the vessel," said the hermit to Zadig, and Spinoza had already said the same thing in other words. The passions are by their nature Immoralities. To Morality is left the impulses which guide the rudder, of little value ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... Racah had disappeared. The only light came from a window hard by. With the music it oozed out between two half-closed shutters, and toward it the depressed one went. He peeped in and saw his son playing at a piano, and by his side sat a queer old man beating time. His name was Spinoza; he was a Portuguese pianist, and wore a tall, battered silk hat which he never removed, even in bed—so ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... reading at this time so limited as might be expected from the foregoing. The study of Shelley's poetry had led me to read pretty nearly all the English lyric poets; Shelley's atheism had led me to read Kant, Spinoza, Godwin, Darwin and Mill; and these, again, in their turn, introduced me to many writers and various literature. I do not think that at this time I cared much for novel reading. Scott seemed to me on a par with Burke's speeches; that is to say, too impersonal for my very personal taste. Dickens ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... last breath in the arms of M. Cousin: so M. Renan informs us.[50] To choose a side between the defenders of the idea of God and its opponents; to choose between Plato and Epicurus, between Origen and Celsus, between Descartes and Hobbes, between Leibnitz and Spinoza, would be to make one's self the Don Quixote of thought. An honest man may find amusement in reading the Amadis of Gaul; the Knight of la Manche went mad through putting faith in the adventures of that hero. A like fate befalls those minds which are simple enough to believe still, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... was to enter into the closest relations with another soul, which, if not eternal in themselves, must eternally affect his growth. Neither, did he believe Woman capable of friendship, [Footnote: See Appendix D, Spinoza's view] would he, by rash haste, lose the chance of finding a friend in the person who might, probably, live half a century by his side. Did love, to his mind, stretch forth into infinity, he would not miss his chance of its revelations, that he might the sooner rest ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... determined by our bias: Tennyson's is unconcealed. His poem is not a tract: it does not aim at the conversion of people with the contrary bias, it is irksome, in writing about a poet, to be obliged to discuss a philosophy which, certainly, is not stated in the manner of Spinoza, but is merely the equilibrium of contending ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... making her final discovery—that she should exist a day and a night in utter vacancy while the ultimate moment still beckoned her from to-morrow. Would time never pass? Was there no way of strangling it before it came to birth? She picked up her favourite books from her desk—Spinoza, Shelley, "The Imitation of Christ"—but the throbbing vitality in her own breast caused the printed pages to turn chill ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... Shelley's melancholy is intimately connected with his philosophical ideas. It is the creed of the student of Berkeley, of Plato, of Spinoza. What is real and unchanging is the one spirit which interpenetrates and upholds the world with "love and beauty and delight," and this spirit—the vision which Alastor pursued in vain, the "Unseen Power" of the 'Ode to Intellectual Beauty'—is what is always suggested by ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... can not be absent from the reality.(232) This assumption pervades the philosophy not only of Descartes, but of all the thinkers who received their impulse mainly from him, in particular the two most remarkable among them, Spinoza and Leibnitz, from whom the modern German metaphysical philosophy is essentially an emanation. I am indeed disposed to think that the fallacy now under consideration has been the cause of two-thirds of the bad philosophy, and especially of the bad metaphysics, which the human mind has never ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill |
