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spinoza | Nothing in nature is by chance... Something appears to be chance only because of our lack of knowledge. | null |
spinoza | When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master. | ethics |
spinoza | The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is. | love;knowledge;education |
spinoza | He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity. | politics |
spinoza | Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them. | education;knowledge |
spinoza | Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love. | love |
spinoza | Big fish eat small fish with as much right as they have power. | politics |
spinoza | Indulge yourself in pleasures only in so far as they are necessary for the preservation of health. | ethics |
spinoza | [Believers] are but triflers who, when they cannot explain a thing, run back to the will of God; this is, truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance. | religion |
spinoza | Let unswerving integrity be your watchword. | ethics |
spinoza | I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them. | knowledge;education;ethics |
spinoza | Sadness diminishes a man's powers | null |
spinoza | What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness. | null |
spinoza | Nature is satisfied with little; and if she is, I am also. | ethics |
spinoza | He who loves God cannot endeavor that God should love him in return. | ethics;religion;love;knowledge |
spinoza | Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds. | politics |
spinoza | Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined. | null |
spinoza | The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation. | religion |
spinoza | the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty. | ethics;knowledge |
spinoza | Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare. | null |
spinoza | Everything in nature is a cause from which there flows some effect. | null |
spinoza | Blessed are the weak who think that they are good because they have no claws. | null |
spinoza | God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. | religion |
spinoza | The greatest secret of monarchic rule...is to keep men deceived and to cloak in the specious name of religion the fear by which they must be checked, so that they will fight for slavery as they would for salvation, and will think it not shameful, but a most honorable achievement, to give their life and blood that one man may have a ground for boasting. | politics |
spinoza | All is One (Nature, God) | null |
spinoza | Faith is nothing but obedience and piety. | religion |
spinoza | The more intelligible a thing is, the more easily it is retained in the memory, and counterwise, the less intelligible it is, the more easily we forget it. | knowledge;education;history;ethics |
spinoza | Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. | null |
spinoza | It is usually the case with most men that their nature is so constituted that they pity those who fare badly and envy those who fare well. | null |
spinoza | Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it, we must direct our lives so as to please the fancy of men. | null |
spinoza | In the mind there is no absolute or free will. | null |
spinoza | None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not. | null |
spinoza | I have tried sedulously not to laugh at the acts of man, nor to lament them, nor to detest them, but to understand them. | knowledge;education;ethics |
spinoza | Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature. | religion;knowledge;ethics |
spinoza | If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil. | ethics |
spinoza | In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity. | knowledge;ethics |
spinoza | them. | knowledge;ethics |
spinoza | Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. | null |
spinoza | .... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow. | null |
spinoza | Men will find that they can ... avoid far more easily the perils which beset them on all sides by united action. | ethics;politics;knowledge |
spinoza | The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. | null |
spinoza | Desire is the essence of a man. | null |
spinoza | Love is pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and hatred pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. | love |
spinoza | He that can carp in the most eloquent or acute manner at the weakness of the human mind is held by his fellows as almost divine. | null |
spinoza | Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. | null |
spinoza | Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace. | knowledge;ethics;politics |
spinoza | A man is as much affected pleasurably or painfully by the image of a thing past or future as by the image of a thing present. | history |
spinoza | Love or hatred towards a thing, which we conceive to be free, must, other things being similar, be greater than if it were felt towards a thing acting by necessity. | ethics |
spinoza | Only that thing is free which exists by the necessities of its own nature, and is determined in its actions by itself alone. | ethics |
spinoza | Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity. | null |
hegel | We learn from history that we do not learn from history | history;knowledge |
hegel | To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great. | ethics;education |
hegel | To be aware of limitations is already to be beyond them. | ethics |
hegel | What history teaches us is that neither nations nor governments ever learn anything from it. | history |
hegel | The valor that struggles is better than the weakness that endures. | ethics;education |
hegel | The more certain our knowledge the less we know. | knowledge;education;ethics;history |
hegel | In a true tragedy, both parties must be right. | politics |
hegel | Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art. | history |
hegel | Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government. | ethics;knowledge |
hegel | The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in everything. | education;knowledge;history;ethics |
hegel | An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. | null |
hegel | Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will. | null |
hegel | America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself. | knowledge;history |
hegel | The history of the world is none other than the progress of the , consciousness of freedom. | history |
hegel | Beauty is merely the Spiritual making itself known sensuously. | null |
hegel | All education is the art of making men ethical (sittlich), of transforming the old Adam into the new Adam. | education;ethics;knowledge |
hegel | Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary. | ethics |
hegel | It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness. | ethics |
hegel | To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality. | null |
hegel | Philosophy is by its nature something esoteric, neither made for the mob nor capable of being prepared for the mob. | null |
hegel | We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. | history |
hegel | Freedom is the fundamental character of the will, as weight is of matter... That which is free is the will. Will without freedom is an empty word. | ethics |
hegel | The people are that part of the state that does not know what it wants. | politics |
hegel | We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest. | knowledge |
hegel | World history is a court of judgment. | history |
hegel | The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary. | ethics |
hegel | The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. | null |
hegel | Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. | history |
hegel | The proofs of the existence of God are to such an extent fallen into discredit that they pass for something antiquated, belonging to days gone by. | history;religion |
hegel | The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. | null |
hegel | The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many. The important thing here is not personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal. | ethics;politics;knowledge |
hegel | The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else. | null |
hegel | The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed | religion;politics;history;ethics |
hegel | To him who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn presents a rational aspect. The relation is mutual. | knowledge;ethics |
hegel | Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue. | null |
hegel | It strikes everyone in beginning to form an acquaintance with the treasures of Indian literature that a land so rich in intellectual products and those of the profoundest order of thought. | knowledge |
hegel | The people will learn to feel the dignity of man. They will not merely demand their rights, which have been trampled in the dust, but themselves will take them - make them their own. | knowledge;ethics;education;politics |
hegel | It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value. | null |
hegel | Children are potentially free and their life directly embodies nothing save potential freedom. Consequently they are not things and cannot be the property either of their parents or others. | ethics |
hegel | When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated. | null |
hegel | It is because the method of physics does not satisfy the comprehension that we have to go on further. | null |
hegel | Consequently, the sensuous aspect of art is related only to the two theoretical sensesof sight and hearing, while smell, taste, and touch remain excluded. | null |
hegel | Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions. | politics |
hegel | The essence of the modern state is that the universal be bound up with the complete freedom of its particular members and with private well-being, that thus the interests of family and civil society must concentrate themselves on the state. It is only when both these moments subsist in their strength that the state can be regarded as articulated and genuinely organized. | null |
hegel | Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it. | ethics |
hegel | The State is the Divine idea as it exists on Earth. | null |
hegel | In the case of various kinds of knowledge, we find that what in former days occupied the energies of men of mature mental ability sinks to the level of information, exercises, and even pastimes for children; and in this educational progress we can see the history of the world's culture delineated in faint outline. | knowledge;education;history |
hegel | Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself. | knowledge |
hegel | We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion. | love |
hegel | The Few assume to be the deputies, but they are often only the despoilers of the Many. | politics |