Frases de Spinoza

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“O ódio é a tristeza acompanhada da ideia de uma causa exterior.”

“É aos escravos, e não aos homens livres, que se dá um prémio para os recompensar por se terem comportado bem.”

“Sendo todas as outras coisas iguais, o desejo que nasce da alegria é mais forte que o desejo que nasce da tristeza.”

“Não é pelas armas, mas pelo amor e pela generosidade que se vencem as almas.”

“Se os homens tivessem no silêncio a mesma capacidade que têm no falar o mundo seria muito mais feliz.”

“Quanto a mim, chamo de livre uma coisa que é e age apenas pela necessidade da sua natureza; de coagida, a que é determinada por uma outra a existir e a agir de uma determinada maneira.”

“O homem que é conduzido pela razão é mais livre na cidade onde vive segundo a lei comum do que na solidão, onde só obedece a si mesmo.”

“É livre a pessoa se pode avançar abertamente sem ter de utilizar artimanhas.”

“O povo apenas transfere livremente para o rei o poder que não domina totalmente: nomeadamente o de arbitragem e de decisão rápida.”

“O homem livre, no que pensa menos é na morte, e a sua sabedoria é uma meditação, não da morte, mas da vida.”

“Todo o homem gosta mais de dar ordens do que de recebê-las.”

“O desejo é a própria essência do homem, ou seja, o esforço pelo qual o homem se esforça por perseverar no seu ser.”

“Uma criancinha acredita apetecer, livrementre, o leite; um menino furioso, a vingança; e o intimidado, a fuga. Um homem embriagado também acredita que é pela livre decisão de sua mente que fala aquilo sobre o qual, mais tarde, já sóbrio, preferiria ter calado. Igualmente, o homem que diz loucuras, a mulher que fala demais, a criança e muitos outros do mesmo gênero acreditam que assim se expressam por uma livre decisão da mente, quando, na verdade, não são capazes de conter o impulso que os leva a falar. Assim, a própria experiência ensina, não menos claramente que a razão, que os homens se julgam livres apenas porque são conscientes de suas ações, mas desconhecem as causas pelas quais são determinados.”

“As coisas nos parecem absurdas ou más porque delas temos um conhecimento parcial, e somos completamente ignorantes quanto à ordem e à coerência da natureza como um todo.”

“Deixo cada um viver segundo a sua compleição, e aceito que os que assim o queiram morram pelo que acreditam ser o seu bem, contanto que me seja permitido, a mim, viver pela verdade.”

“Paz não é a ausência de guerra; é uma virtude, um estado mental, uma disposição para a benevolência, confiança e justiça.”

“Tenho evitado cuidadosamente rir-me dos actos humanos, ou desprezá-los; o que tenho feito é tratar de compreendê-los.”

“Uma emoção deixa de ser paixão assim que formamos uma clara e distinta ideia acerca dela.”

“A liberdade não exclui a necessidade de agir; pelo contrário, coloca-a.”

“aquele que quer responder às injúrias com o ódio vive na tristeza ou na mágoa, aquele que quer vencer o ódio com o amor combate alegremente e sem temor. Triunfa tanto sobre um grande número de inimigos quanto sobre um único, prescindindo de todo socorro da fortuna. Aqueles a quem ele consegue vencer ficam alegres por terem sido derrotados; e, derrotados, eles não são menos fortes; ao contrário, são mais fortes.”

“Quem vive dirigido pela razão, se esforça, tanto quanto pode, por compensar pelo amor e pela generosidade, o ódio recíproco.”

“Cada um tem tantos direitos, segundo o poder que tem.”

“Sentimos e sabemos por experiência que somos eternos.”

“A imaginação é algo vago pelo qual a alma padece.”

“Compreender é o começo da aprovação.”

“A paixão sem a razão é cega, a razão sem a paixão é inativa.”

“A mente humana é parte do intelecto infinito de Deus.”

“Não rir, nem lamentar-se, nem odiar mas compreender.”

“Não chore, não ria, mas compreenda.”

“Mente e corpo são um só.”

“A experiência não nos ensina as essências das coisas.”

“A felicidade não é um prêmio da virtude, é a própria virtude.”

“Toda a ideia que é absoluta em nós, ou seja adequada e perfeita, é verdadeira.”

“Tenho me esforçado por não rir das ações humanas, por não deplorá-las nem odiá-las, mas por entendê-las.”

“Não chore; não seja indigno. Entenda”

“A felicidade é a compreensão lógica do mundo e da vida.”

“Não Chore. Não se revolte. Compreenda.”

“Tudo o que existe, existe em Deus, e nada pode existir nen ser conhecido sem Deus.”

“Nenhum ato pode ser chamado de mau senão relativamente à nossa liberdade.”

“Nossa liberdade não é contingência, nem indiferença; ela consiste no modo de afirmar ou de negar; isto é, quanto menos formos indiferentes ao afirmarmos ou negarmos alguma coisa, mais seremos livres.”

“A liberdade é uma virtude e, portanto, tudo que em alguém é sinal de impotência não pode ser atribuído à sua liberdade. (…) Quanto mais livre alguém é, menos podemos dizer que esse alguém pode não usar da razão e escolher o mal em vez do bem.”

“This I know, that between finite and infinite there is no comparison; so that the difference between God and the greatest and most excellent created thing is no less than the difference between God and the least created thing.”

“A God-intoxicated man.”

“And then, a little Jew, with a long nose and a pale complexion, Poor but satisfied, pensive and reserved, A subtle but hollow spirit, less read than celebrated, Hidden under the mantle of Descartes, his mentor, Walking with measured steps, comes close to the great being: Excuse me, he says, addressing him in a whisper, But I think, just between us, that you do not exist at all.”

“Spinoza in particular belongs to the immortal authors. He is great because of the sublime simplicity of his thoughts and his way of writing, great because of his distance from all scholasticism, and, on the other hand, from all false embellishment or ostentation of language.”

“It is unquestionably the peacefulness and calm of the Spinozist system which particularly produces the idea of its depth, and which, with hidden but irresistible charm, has attracted so many minds. The Spinozist system will also always remain in a certain sense a model. A system of freedom — but with just as great contours, with the same simplicity, as a perfect counter-image (Gegenbild) of the Spinozist system — this would really be the highest system. This is why Spinozism, despite the many attacks on it, and the many supposed refutations, has never really become something truly past, never been really overcome up to now, and no one can hope to progress to the true and the complete in philosophy who has not at least once in his life lost himself in the abyss of Spinozism. Nobody who wishes to arrive at his own firm conviction should leave unread the main work of Spinoza, his Ethics (for he presented his system under this title), and I should like to urge everyone who is seriously concerned with his education not only to study assiduously on his own, which no teacher can replace, but to be most conscientious and careful in the choice of what he reads.”

“Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.”

“It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that — from Spinoza down to the great French materialists — it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural science of the future.”

“In America we are such rowdies in church and state and the very boys are so soon ripe, that I think no philosophical skepticism will make much sensation. Spinoza pronounced that there was but one substance; yea, verily, but that boy yonder told me yesterday he thought the pinelog was God, and that God was in the jakes. What can Spinoza tell the boy?”

“Can any one doubt that if the noblest saint among the Buddhists, the best Mahometan, the highest Stoic of Athens, the purest and wisest Christian, — Buddha and Menu in India, Confucius in China, Spinoza in Holland, could somewhere meet and converse, — they would all find themselves of one religion, — would find themselves denounced by their own sects, and sustained by these believed adversaries of their sects.”

“Is Spinoza baroque? No, but if we find, through this line of thinking, a spurious and worn-out figure that rejects the crisis, that repeats the utopia in its ingenuous Renaissance form, what we have found is merely Spinozism. When classical idealism takes up Spinoza, in effect it only takes up (or invents?) Spinozism, a Renaissance philosophy of the bourgeois revolution of the capitalist market!”

“In Spinoza, at the origin of the Modern world, metaphysical theory and the theory of science are given in complete agreement for the first time. They represent the alternative to the entire subsequent path of metaphysics and of the bourgeois theory of science. Spinoza lives as an alternative: Today this alternative is real. The Spinozian analytic of full space and open time are becoming an ethics of liberation in all the dimensions that this discourse constructs and makes available.”

“And therefore we can see just how constructive this Spinozian difference is, just how constructive this negativity really is! The organic interweaving of these two motifs is fundamental in the history of European philosophy. Spinoza is the first to mold this logical mechanism that bourgeois philosophy would constantly and continually try to abrogate during its subsequent development. In Kantianism, as in classical idealism, Spinoza continually remains the object of opposition and polemic: What is destroyed is precisely the intersection between the negation of the ideology and the construction of the world, the inherence of the limit, of the materiality, to the infinite.”

“Spinoza accomplishes the synthesis of traditional philosophical components by means of breaking and shattering. It is useless to pursue the presuppositions of Spinozian philosophy if we do not look for them in the qualitative leap determined by his philosophy. The continuity of Spinozian thought with respect to the preceding course of the history of metaphysics consists of a radical discontinuity, one that exalts the utopia of consciousness and freedom (a patrimony of Western thought) in a project of liberation. The perspective of the world is not a utopia, the immanentism is not aesthetic, and the liberation is no longer artisanal, but all of this is presupposed, it is taken as a basis.”

“Some have spoken of a liberal Spinoza, and others, of a democratic Spinoza. By the same standard one could also speak of an artistocratic Spinoza or a monarchical Spinoza — and it has been done. Perhaps also an anarchic Spinoza? No one has ever said that.”

“However, his contemporary, Leibnitz, the father of the German enlightenment, who created an optimistic world-picture, always remained only a philosopher for philosophers. Even Immanuel Kant, although always famous, was never popular. In his own fatherland he was all but forgotten for most of the nineteenth century until revived by Hermann Cohen and his school. Spinoza, however, was never exhumed because he was never buried. Kant, because of his exclusive intellectuality, has influenced only his students, while Spinoza, because of his emotional appeal, has ruled even those who have never heard his name.”

“It may be observed, however, that Spinoza was not the first prominent monist and pantheist in modern Europe. A generation before him Bruno conveyed a similar message to humanity. Yet Bruno is merely a beautiful episode in the history of the human mind, while Spinoza is one of its most potent forces. Bruno was a rhapsodist and a poet, who was overwhelmed with artistic emotions; Spinoza, however, was spiritus purus and in his method the prototype of the philosopher.”

“Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew, made the Jewish cultural position in the West not only tenable, but impregnable. But the same Baruch Spinoza was actually responsible for the cultural anti-Semitism of modern Europe. He shaped the strong anti-Jewish attitude of his greatest admirers, followers, and adepts Herder, Goethe, Hegel, and Fichte. They were outspoken Jew-haters. They admired Spinoza, but with their master hated his race and its world-picture.”

“Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit—amor intellectualis dei—after the fashion of Spinoza.”

“When I speak of Plato, Pascal, Spinoza and Goethe, I know that their blood flows in mine—I am proud, when I tell the truth about them—the family is good enough not to have to poeticize or to conceal; and thus I stand to everything that has been, I am proud of the humanity, and especially proud of unconditional truthfulness.”

“Spinoza, too, whom I was reading under Royce himself, filled me with joy and enthusiasm: I gathered at once from him a doctrine which has remained axiomatic with me ever since, namely that good and evil are relative to the natures of animals, irreversible in that relation, but indifferent to the march of cosmic events, since the force of the universe infinitely exceeds the force of any of its parts.”

“When you say Spinoza, however, besides being too flattering, the comparison is not biographically so true. My Spinozism is in the Life of Reason, less obviously, perhaps, yet more dominantly, than in Realms of Being.”

“I believe there is another reason also why Spinoza seems to me so pre-eminent: that in spite of being traditional, or because he was not distracted by side issues, he was an entire and majestic mind, a singularly consecrated soul. All these trite dogmas and problems lived in him and were the natural channels for his intuitions and emotions. That is what I feel to make a real philosopher and not, what we are condemned to be, professors of the philosophy of other people, or of our own opinions.”

“My philosophy is normal human orthodox philosophy, such as has come down from the Indians through the Greeks, to Spinoza. It is simply not Protestant philosophy. The problems of Protestant philosophy do not exist for me: I regard them as products of a confusion of thought, of a heresy. Catholic philosophy differs from the normal only in that it accepts sacred history as well as natural history as the true account of the facts: but when the facts are agreed upon, one way or another, philosophy has no real difficulty in discovering what to say. It has said everything essential already. To invent a philosophy would be not to have understood.”

“I can always say to myself that my atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests; and that even in this denial I am no rude iconoclast, but full of secret sympathy with the impulses of idolaters.”

“I proposed not to bore you with any more of my metaphysics or ethics, but I will say a word by way of conclusion. If you want any more, go to Spinoza and Schopenhauer, where I get mine.”

“As a student, in an hour when he was needing the help of sages, he followed Renan; Spinoza freed his mind in matters of religion; from afar came the brotherly greeting of Tolstoi.”

“But how to write about a man who lived such a contemplative life marked by so few striking external events? He was extraordinarily private, and he kept his own person invisible in his writing. I had none of the material that ordinarily lends itself to narrative—no family dramas, no love affairs, jealousies, curious anecdotes, feuds, spats, or reunions. He had a large correspondence, but after his death his colleagues followed his instructions and removed almost all personal comments from his letters. No, not much external drama in his life: most scholars regard Spinoza as a placid and gentle soul—some compare his life to that of Christian saints, some even to Jesus.”

“I also believe that Spinoza, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, on whose lives and philosophy I have based two earlier novels, wrote much that is highly relevant to my field of psychiatry and psychotherapy—for example, that ideas, thoughts, and feelings are caused by previous experiences, that passions may be studied dispassionately, that understanding leads to transcendence—and I wished to celebrate his contributions through a novel of ideas.”

“Monist is, in fact, every philosophy that is not an eclectic patchwork. Therefore, I gladly admit to you that I myself consider my positions even more monist than yours, because I try to give my monism a broader extension, following as far as possible the example of the greatest of all monists: Spinoza.”