Baruch Spinoza Quotes

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.

God has created a logical universe of cause and effect. He who repudiates causality actually repudiates reason.

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Everything actual must also first have been possible, before having actual existence.

The world of reason is to be regarded as a great and immortal being, who ceaselessly works out what is necessary, and so makes himself lord also over what is accidental.

The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.

God is all there is - God includes everything, all possibility and all action, for Spirit is the invisible essence and substance of all form.

The apprehension of necessity is an imitation of creation.

In a universe governed by God there are no chance events. Indeed, there is no such thing as chance. Chance does not exist. It is merely a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities. But chance itself has no power because it has no being. Chance is not an entity that can influence reality. Chance is not a thing. It is nothing.

In fact, it is more correct to say that Truth is God, than to say that God is Truth.

God is the universal substance in existing things. He comprises all things. He is the fountain of all being. In Him exists everything that is.

There is nothing without reason.

The Absolute is the material of both God and man.

Does there exist an Infinity outside ourselves? Is that infinity One, immanent and permanent, necessarily having substance, since He is infinite and if He lacked matter He would be limited, necessarily possessing intelligence since He is infinite and, lacking intelligence, He would be in that sense finite. Does this Infinity inspire in us the idea of essense, while to ourselves we can only attribute the idea of existence? In order words, is He not the whole of which we are but the part?

But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this;-we can perceive that events are brought about, not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular ease, but by the establishment of general laws.

Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are.

Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

In the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections', of 'necessity', or of 'psychological non-freedom'; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or 'law'. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed 'in itself', we act once more as we have always acted- mythologically.

Fate then is that necessity by which a certain result will surely be brought to pass according to the natural course of events however we may vary the particular circumstances which precede the event.

God only acts and is, in existing beings or men.

There is no result in nature without a cause; understand the cause and you will have no need of the experiment.

You show the world as a complete, unbroken chain, an eternal chain, linked together by cause and effect.

The totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.