"Spinoza" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been forged and refined into the philosophical objection to miracles. Two great thinkers of past generations, two of the keenest and clearest intellects which have appeared since the Reformation, laid the foundations of it long ago. Spinoza urged the uselessness of miracles, and Hume their incredibility, with a guarded subtlety and longsighted refinement of statement which made them in advance of their age except with a few. But their reflections ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... 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 ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... disguised—the kind of "love" which makes a young man shoot a girl who refuses him. The mediaeval writer Leon Hebraeus evidently knew of no other when he defined love as "a desire to enjoy that which is good"; nor Spinoza when he defined it as laetetia concomitante idea externae causae—a pleasure accompanied by the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... spirit of Europe to react into free thinking or to make a frontal attack on revealed truth. They took their stand on a fundamental Christian theism, the common religion of all good men; they repudiated the negative enormities of Hobbes and Spinoza. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... of A Persian Passion-Play). The two first of these were general, on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and The Literary Influence of Academies, while the other seven dealt respectively with the two Guerins, Heine, Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment, Joubert, Spinoza, and Marcus Aurelius. I am afraid it must be taken as only too strong a confirmation of Mr Arnold's own belief as to the indifference of the English people to criticism that no second edition of this book was called for till four years were past, no third for ten, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... 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 decisive ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... tell you, 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
... instances might be quoted, from the religious history of the old world, where a nation's insight into the attributes of deity was singularly in advance of their general state of cultivation. The best thinkers of the Semitic race, for example, from Moses to Spinoza, have been in this respect far ahead of their often more generally ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... Articles: Benedict Spinoza; The New Homeric Question; State Reform in Austria; Courage in Belief; Jane Austen's Novels; New Books of Piety; The Thirty-seventh Congress; Review ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... father of Felix in loving token to his wife. It was the grandfather of Felix who first gave glory to the name. We sometimes forget that Moses Mendelssohn was one of the greatest thinkers Germany has produced—the man who summed up in his own head all the philosophy of the time and gave Spinoza to the world. This was the man to whom the erratic Zelter was bound in admiration, and when it was suggested that he teach musical composition to the grandchild of his idol, he accepted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... looked about him. 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 ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... God." On a similar outburst in verse, the Rev. F. Hodgson comments with a sweet humanity, "The poor dear soul meant nothing of this." Elsewhere the poet writes, "I have read Watson to Gibbon. He proves nothing; so I am where I was, verging towards Spinoza; and yet it is a gloomy creed; and I want a better; but there is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but I doubt everything." But his early attitude on matters of religion is best set forth in a letter to Gilford, of 1813, in which he says, "I am no bigot to ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... is, that Not-being is relation. Not-being is the other of Being, and has as many kinds as there are differences in Being. This doctrine is the simple converse of the famous proposition of Spinoza,—not 'Omnis determinatio est negatio,' but 'Omnis negatio est determinatio';—not, All distinction is negation, but, All negation is distinction. Not-being is the unfolding or determining of Being, and is a necessary element in all other ...
— Sophist • Plato
... broke upon me from the fountains of the great deep, and fell from the windows of heaven. The fontal truths of natural Religion, and the book of Revelation, alike contributed to the flood; and it was long ere my Ark touched upon Ararat, and rested. My head was with Spinoza, though my heart was with ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... 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 is ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two friends went together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literature {234} and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... vague; people might play at cat's-cradle or study Spinoza, just as they pleased; but, whatever they did, they must give their minds to it. She kept house from an easy-chair, and ruled her dependants with severity tempered by wit, and by the very sweetest voice in ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Justin. Arius. Athanasius. Moses Maimonides. John Agricola. Michael Servetus. Simonis Menno. Francis Xavier. Faustus Socinus. Robert Brown. James Arminius. Francis Higginson. Richard Baxter. George Fox. William Penn. Benedict Spinoza. Ann Lee. John Glass. George Keith. Nicholas Louis, Count Zinzendorf. William Courtney. Richard Hooker. Charles Chauncey. Roger Williams. John Clarke. Ann Hutchinson. Michael Molinos. John Wesley. George ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... inevitably lead to lynching, if no other recognized method of punishment existed. There is in most men a certain natural vindictiveness, not always directed against the worst members of the community. For example, Spinoza was very nearly murdered by the mob because he was suspected of undue friendliness to France at a time when Holland was at war with that country. Apart from such cases, there would be the very real danger of an organized attempt to destroy Anarchism and revive ancient oppressions. Is ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... questions, he should acquire some slight acquaintance with the history of the questions discussed. Had this been done by our critic in the present case, it might possibly have occurred to him to doubt whether a doctrine supported by philosophers of such different schools of thought as Spinoza, Malebranche, Wolf, Kant, Schelling, could be quite such a piece of transparent nonsense as he supposes it to be. All these writers are cited in Mr. Mansel's note, as maintaining the theory that the Absolute is the ens realissimum, or sum of all existence; and their names might have ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... conditions which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be filled with that Amor intellectualis Dei, the beatific vision of the vita contemplativa, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... not only embodies the Great Philosophical Idea, that the Deity is the ENS, the TO ON, the Absolute Existence, that of which the Essence is To Exist, the only Substance of Spinoza, the BEING, that never could not have existed, as contradistinguished from that which only becomes, not Nature or the Soul of Nature, but that which created Nature; but also the idea of the Male and Female Principles, in its highest and most profound ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... philosophy in Zuerich, where he died on the 18th of August 1896. At Leipzig he was one of the founders of the Akademisch-philosophische Verein, and was the first editor of the Vierteljahrsschrift fuer wissenschaftliche Philosophie. In 1868 he published an essay on the Pantheism of Spinoza. His chief works are Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemaess dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses (1876) and the Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (1888-1890). In these works he made an attempt to co-ordinate thought and action. Like Mach, he started from the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Locke, Bayle, Spinoza, Hobbes, the Lord Shaftesbury, Collins, nor Toland lighted up the firebrand of discord in their countries; this has generally been the work of divines, who being at first puffed up with the ambition of becoming chiefs of a sect, soon grew very desirous ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... Came 'cross our lonely sail— Spinoza's Sea-Invincibles! But, whew! our shots like hail Made shortish work of galley long And chubby sailing craft— Our making ready first to close Sent ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... were hard at work. George Eliot was writing an article on Weimar for Fraser, on Cumming for Westminster, and translating Spinoza's Ethics. No name was signed to these productions, as it would not do to have it known that a woman wrote them. The education of most women was so meagre that the articles would have been considered of little value. Happily Girton and Newnham colleges are changing this estimate ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... adjectives or substantives have been much or often recognized, while those named by verbs and prepositions have been usually overlooked. This omission has had a very great effect upon philosophy; it is hardly too much to say that most metaphysics, since Spinoza, has been largely determined by it. The way this has occurred is, in outline, as follows: Speaking generally, adjectives and common nouns express qualities or properties of single things, whereas prepositions ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... 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
... pains has an especial importance, by reason of its foundation in the nature of man, and its inseparable connection with his very existence as a thinking being. And as regards the motive of personal affection: Love, as Spinoza profoundly says, is the association of pleasure with that which is loved. [Footnote: "Nempe, Amor nihil aliud est, quam Laetitia, concomitante idea causae externae."—Ethices, III. xiii.] Or, to put it to the common sense of mankind, is the gratification of affection a pleasure ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... to the world Saint Louis, Joan of Arc, Calvin, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Pasteur, Victor Hugo has left its imperial imprint upon the whole of modern civilization, yet I cannot but be conscious of the prior and higher claims of that strange family of whose blood Moses, Jesus and Spinoza were born. Judaism and Hellenism, said Renan, are the twin miracles of human history. The artistic and philosophical primacy of the Greeks is not so striking as the religious primacy of the Hebrews. The worship of beauty is a less vital element than the undying quest for righteousness. The ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... flung out for fools to sport with, sir! Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn't the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... cannot see their style. With the Latin works of writers who think for themselves, the case is different, and their style is visible; writers, I mean, who have not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others. An affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further, the language in which a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which he belongs; and here there are many hard and fast differences, beginning ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of the land, its 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 to inspire the mind to the production of such poetical works ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... Miss Dumont's friend, Scarborough, quoted from Spinoza at Atwater's the other night? 'If a stone, on its way from the sling through the air, could speak, it would say, "How free I am!'" Is ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... 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
... Unity of the Godhead, and so dwelt for a while in the spirit of John Huss and Jerome of Prague and Socinus and old John Zisca, and ran through Neal's History of the Puritans, and Calamy's Non-Conformists' Memorial, having like thoughts and passions with them—but then Spinoza became his God, and he took up the vast chain of being in his hand, and the round world became the centre and the soul of all things in some shadowy sense, forlorn of meaning, and around him he beheld the living traces ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... new wife. Kitty, my dear, it is no laughing matter! I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at Cambridge who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading out of his depth in Spinoza. None of the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least good in that state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently upon the chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker's book (you should read it, Sisty); then I threw in strong doses of Fichte; after ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of truth, and the deep moral purport of what he believes to be the one true message for mankind. The human race lies fettered by superstition and ignorance; his mission is to dispel their darkness by that light of truth which is "clearer than the beams of the sun or the shining shafts of day." Spinoza has been called, in a bold figure, "a man drunk with God;" the contemplation of the "nature of things," the physical structure of the universe, and the living and all but impersonate law which forms and sustains it, has the same intoxicating influence over Lucretius. God and man are alike ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the third place, we object to universal foreordination because it destroys all moral distinctions. Praise has been bestowed upon Spinoza because he showed that moral distinctions are annihilated by the scheme of necessity. But, indeed, it requires very little perception to see that this must be the case. If God has, as is said, determined every event, then it is impossible for the creature to act otherwise than ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... publication and was much sought after by collectors. It contains five letters, the first three 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 ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... intimate connection with the phenomena of ticklishness which could not fail to be recognized. This connection is, indeed, the basis of Spinoza's famous definition of love,—"Amor est titillatio quaedam concomitante idea causae externae,"—a statement which seems to be reflected in Chamfort's definition of love as "l'echange de deux fantaisies, et le contact de deux epidermes." The sexual act, says Gowers, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
