Baruch Spinoza citáty

strana 7

„Útěchou nešťastných je mít spolutrpitele.“

„Svoboda je poznaná nutnost.“

„Příroda sama je bůh.“

„Občanská svoboda je omezena zákony v zájmu ostatních občanů. Svoboda není bezuzdnost. Je tím větší, čím více se používá rozum.“

„Nenávist, pravý opak lásky, vzniká z bludu, vycházejícího z domněnek.“

„Moudrostí je pozorování života, nikoli smrti.“

„Svobodný člověk nepřemýšlí o ničem méně než o smrti a jeho moudrost spočívá v úvahách o životě, ne o smrti.“

„Nemyslím, že by pro spásu duše bylo nutné poznat Krista podle těla. Zato pokud jde o Věčného Božího Syna, Věčnou Boží Moudrost, jak se projevuje ve všech věcech, hlavně v lidské duši a nade všechno v Ježíši Kristu – to je úplně jiná věc.“

„Vytrvale jsem se snažil nesmát se lidským činům, nenaříkat nad nimi, ani si je neošklivit, nýbrž je pochopit.“

„Všechny dobré věci jsou obtížné a vzácné.“

„Kdo umí jen napadat a pranýřovat jejich chyby, a neumí jejich ducha posílit, nýbrž pouze zlomit, je na obtíž sobě i ostatním.“

„Svoboda neruší nutnost, nýbrž ji předpokládá.“

„Člověk je svobodný, může-li postupovat otevřeně a nemusí užívat lstí.“

„Náš druh je součástí Přírody, nikoliv v ní uzavřená říše.“

„Zkušenost nás učí, že lidé málo ovládají svůj jazyk.“

„Nejlepší kvalitou peněz je jejich kvantita.“

„Nikoli pohoršovat se, nikoli divit se, ale chápat.“

„Ve svobodném státě si smí každý myslit, co chce, a vyjadřovat, co si myslí.“

„Radost je přechod člověka od menší dokonalosti k větší. Smutek je přechod člověka od větší dokonalosti k menší.“

„Pocit, který je utrpením, přestane být utrpením, jakmile si o něm vytvoříme jasnou a zřetelnou představu.“

„Co nazýváme pravdou? Klam starý tisíc let. Co je klam? Pravda, která žije teprve minutu.“

„Radost, to je dokonalost.“

„Emoce přestává být emocí, jakmile si o ní vytvoříme jasnou a zřetelnou ideu.“

„Není smrti, nýbrž jen řada přeměn, které jsem již přežil a lepší z nich ještě přežiji.“

„Každý má tolik práva, kolik má moci.“
TANTUM IURIS HABET UNUSQUISQUE, QUANTUM POTENTIA VALET

„Bohem rozumím absolutně nekonečné jsoucno, tj. substanci sestávající z nekonečného počtu atributů, z nichž každý vyjadřuje věčnou a nekonečnou esenci.“

„Nikdo až dosud nezjistil, co tělo může.“

„Člověk jedná naprosto podle zákonů své přirozenosti jen tehdy, když žije pod vedením rozumu.“

„Štěstí je odměnou ctnosti - tou je ctnost sama.“

„Ctnost a síla jsou jedno a totéž.“

„Lidská duše nemůže být úplně zničena zároveň s tělem, ale zůstane z ní cosi takového, co je věčné.“

„Pyšní lidé a lidé, kteří se podceňují, jsou nejvíce vydáni na pospas afektům.“

„Blaženost není odměnou ctnosti, nýbrž sama ctnost.“

„Útěchou nešťastných je mít ve svém trápení druhy“

„Spokojenost se sebou samým je ve skutečnosti to nejvyšší v co můžeme doufat.“

“For years my mind was divided between Hegel and Spinoza. With youthful ingenuity I defended the dialectics of the former against Zeller, the founder of neo-Kantianism. The writings of Spinoza I knew by heart, and with loving understanding I gave expositions of his theory of affections and passions.”

“The movement of modern philosophy is back towards the position of the old Ionian philosophers, but strengthened and clarified by sound scientific ideas. If I publish my criticism on Comte, I should have to re-write it as a summary of philosophical ideas from the earliest times. The thread of philosophical development is not on the lines usually laid down for it. It goes from Democritus and the rest to the Epicureans, and then the Stoics, who tried to reconcile it with popular theological ideas, just as was done by the Christian Fathers. In the Middle Ages it was entirely lost under the theological theories of the time; but reappeared with Spinoza, who, however, muddled it up with a lot of metaphysics which made him almost unintelligible.”

“I have a great respect for the Nazarenism of Jesus — very little for later Christianity. But the only religion that appeals to me is prophetic Judaism. Add to it something from the best Stoics and something from Spinoza and something from Goethe, and there is a religion for men.”

“It is a pity that such a thinker as Spinoza had to leave our stage so soon. He could not live to see the enormous progress of science which would also have improved his system.”

“It is an amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with a foreboding that his role of teacher of the Swedish Queen would be his last, old Kant smelling a grated horseradish before his daily walk (the cane preceding him, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand), Spinoza consumed by tuberculosis and patiently polishing lenses, so weak he is unable to finish his Treatise on the Rainbow.”

“When we read Spinoza, we are seized with a feeling like that of seeing nature at its grandest in most vigorous repose: a forest of thoughts, tall as the sky, whose blooming tree-tops sway back and forth, while imperturbable trunks stand rooted in the eternal soil. There is a certain soft breeze in the writings of Spinoza which is inexplicable. It stirs the reader with the winds of the future. The spirit of the Hebrew prophets still rested perhaps on their late descendant. At the same time, there is a seriousness to him, a self-confident pride, a grandeur of thought which also seems to be an inheritance, since Spinoza belonged to one of those families of martyrs which had been expelled from Spain by those most Catholic kings.”

“Now, if instituting comparisons in both directions, we place the lowest and most ape-like men (the Austral Negroes, Bushmen, and Andamans, etc.), on the one hand, together with the most highly developed animals, for instance, with apes, dogs, and elephants, and on the other hand, with the most highly developed men—Aristotle, Newton, Spinoza, Kant, Lamarck, or Goethe—we can then no longer consider the assertion, that the mental life of the higher mammals has gradually developed up to that of man, as in any way exaggerated. If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.”

“Since I always like Zhuangzi and I am close to Tagore, I am greatly affected by the thought of pantheism. Hence, my works are close to works of the great philosopher of Europe Spinoza and poetry of German poet Goethe.”

“Can the seventeenth-century rationalist, who produced one of the most ambitious philosophical systems in the history of Western philosophy, be considered, by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker? Can he even be considered a Jew? Benedictus Spinoza is the greatest philosopher that the Jews ever produced, which adds a certain irony to his questionable Jewishness.”

“Spinoza helps me to see myself objectively. This makes life bearable even in experiencing suffering; and with the teachings from the Ethics the world is perceived as manageable.”

“The Jewish tradition has two distinct tendencies: the more fundamental one, represented by the philosophers and poets and scholars who were interested only in Jewish issues and in the Jewish Weltanschauung; and the other tendency associated with great figures such as Spinoza or Einstein, and to a certain extent also Heinrich Heine, and which applied the traditions of Jewish thinking to other cultures, including German culture, and to other issues. It is not difficult to see how a double identity developed among Jews.”

“The piety of philosophers is theory, pure intuition of the divinity, calm and gay in silent solitude. Spinoza is the ideal of the species. The religious state of the poet is more passionate and more communicative.”

“It is generally agreed that Spinoza fell into nominalism. But he did in any case take measures to protect himself from idealism, both in developing his theory of a substance with infinite attributes, and in arguing for the parallelism of the two attributes extension and thought.”

“To sum it up in a word: Marx was close to Hegel in his insistence on rejecting every philosophy of the Origin and of the Subject, whether rationalist, empiricist or transcendental; in his critique of the cogito, of the sensualist-empiricist subject and of the transcendental subject, thus in his critique of the idea of a theory of knowledge. Marx was close to Hegel in his critique of the legal subject and of the social contract, in his critique of the moral subject, in short of every philosophical ideology of the Subject, which whatever the variation involved gave classical bourgeois philosophy the means of guaranteeing its ideas, practices and goals by not simply reproducing but philosophically elaborating the notions of the dominant legal ideology. And if you consider the grouping of these critical themes, you have to admit that Marx was close to Hegel just in respect to those features which Hegel had openly borrowed from Spinoza, because all this can be found in the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.”

“The attention that literary artists have lavished on Spinoza is remarkable. Writers have not only shaped their aesthetics by reflection on Spinoza, have not only inserted his views into the inner lives and dialogues of their characters, but have molded the man himself into a protagonist in their novels, poems, and plays. This last aspect of the literary fascination with Spinoza is particularly noteworthy. The person of Benedictus Spinoza has drawn, over the centuries, unusual attention, and not only from literary writers.”

“Let no one argue against this that we are living in a different century, that much water has flowed under the bridge and that our problems are no longer the same. We are discussing living water which has not yet flowed away. We are familiar with enough historical examples, beginning with that of Spinoza, where men have worked ferociously to wall up for ever and bury deep in the earth sources which were made to quench their thirsts, but which their fear will not tolerate. For nearly a century academic philosophy has buried Marx in the earth of silence, the earth of the cemetery.”

“The first person ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in consequence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the first in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary and the true. This explains to us why Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science, and why in the last analysis this foundation was consummated in the dissipation of the religious myth of reading.”

“I have had, for my entire life, an extraordinary esteem for the person and for the thinking of that great philosopher. But I do not believe that attitude gives me the right to say anything publically about him, for the good reason that I would have nothing to say that has not been said by others.”

“I confess without hesitation my dependence regarding the teachings of Spinoza. If I never cared to cite his name directly, it is because I never drew the tenets of my thinking from the study of that author but rather from the atmosphere he created.”

“I do not have the professional knowledge to write a scholarly article about Spinoza. But what I think about this man I can express in a few words. Spinoza was the first to apply with strict consistency the idea of an all-pervasive determinism to human thought, feeling, and action. In my opinion, his point of view has not gained general acceptance by all those striving for clarity and logical rigor only because it requires not only consistency of thought, but also unusual integrity, magnamity, and — modesty.”

“My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem—the most important of all human problems.”

“Goethe found such a point of view early in Spinoza, and he gladly recognizes how much the views of this great thinker have been in keeping with the needs of his youth. He found himself in him, and so he could fix himself to him in the most beautiful way.”

“The greatest philosophical genius Judaism has given to the world, Spinoza, is the only one of the great philosophers for whom, in reality, God is the sole subject of thought;…”

“I think Spinoza was a complete monist. Unity is good, multiplicity cannot lead you to the truth. His political theory is in some ways like that of Hobbes. From his point of view, in politics you have to govern. In order to govern, a rational person might have to do things which are not strictly honourable. Spinoza is a surprisingly tough-minded political thinker.”

“Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza.”

“I always carry the Ethics of Spinoza with me.”

“Woe to him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his very vulgarity, and by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man, from his granite pedestal, will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he found; and ages hence, the cultivated traveler, passing by this spot, will say in his heart, "The truest vision ever had of God came, perhaps, here."”

“Lovingly facing the “one is everything”
amor dei, happy from comprehension—
Take off your shoes! That three times holy land—
—Yet secretly beneath this love, devouring,
A fire of revenge was shimmering,
The Jewish God devoured by Jewish hatred . . .
Hermit! Have I recognized you?”

“...I hold up before myself the images of Dante and Spinoza, who were better at accepting the lot of solitude. Of course, their way of thinking, compared to mine, was one which made solitude bearable...”