Baruch Spinoza Quotes on Virtue
Spinoza's Ethics demonstrates that virtue and self-preservation in the rational sense coincide: an agent acts virtuously to the extent that it acts from adequate ideas — understanding the causes of its own affects and so freeing itself from passive bondage to them. Books III and IV trace the geometry of the human passions — joy, sadness, love, hatred, hope, fear — and show how the wise person's substitution of adequate for inadequate ideas yields the active affects that constitute genuine human freedom and power. Book V completes the program with the intellectual love of God — the mind's adequate knowledge of the eternal essence of things conceived under the aspect of eternity — which Spinoza identifies as the highest human blessedness.
Quotes
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Attributed to Baruch Spinoza:
“Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”
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Attributed to Baruch Spinoza:
“Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.”
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Attributed to Baruch Spinoza:
“He who lives according to the dictates of reason endeavours, as much as possible, to render back love, or kindness, for other men's hatred, anger, and contempt towards him.”
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“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
Et sane arduum debet esse, quod adeo raro reperitur. Qui enim posset fieri, si salus in promptu esset et sine magno labore reperiri posset, ut ab omnibus fere negligeretur? Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt. -
Attributed to Baruch Spinoza:
“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”
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“Liberally rendered in A Natural History of Peace (1996) by Thomas Gregor as: "Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."”
Political Treatise(1677)