Spinoza, Baruch

"Passive emotions can be destroyed or controlled through active emotions that are opposed to them."

"Knowledge of good and evil is nothing but an affect of joy or sadness insofar as we are conscious of it."

"Man is necessarily always subject to human emotions."

"The desire to live, to preserve oneself, is the primary and fundamental striving in all things."

"Reason directs us to seek for ourselves and our friends that which is truly useful."

"To be determined to action is our power; to be determined to passivity is our bondage."

"The highest human good consists in having the power of forming good ideas, in understanding all things through ideas."

"Perfection and reality are one and the same."

"Insofar as things are infinite, they must all be expressed through infinite attributes."

"A thing is called necessary which cannot but exist."

"Joy which is excessive may degenerate into a bad state."

"The individual human mind is incapable of being absolutely destroyed with the body."

"Anything which increases the body's capacity for action increases the mind's capacity for thought."

"We are determined to act by our joy or sadness."

"The more the mind understands all things as governed by necessity, the greater is the power of the mind over the emotions."

"Eternal truth has nothing to do with time."

"To live is to preserve one's being; this is the primary law of nature."

"He who imagines that the one whom he loves is changed is bound to be sad."

"There is nothing in nature which is not determined by God to a certain action."

"The mind endeavors to persist in its being."

"Inadequate ideas are the cause of falsity."

"God is the indwelling and not the external cause of all things."

"Things are good insofar as they help us persist in being; they are evil insofar as they prevent this."

"The highest virtue of the mind is to know things under the aspect of eternity."

"The striving by which each thing strives to persist in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing."

"External causes can only determine an individual thing by external causes."

"Every individual thing or body and every mind is in every moment destroyed and again created anew."

"Knowledge of the third kind is eternal and infinite joy."

"The power of thinking is proportionate to the power of acting."

"Nothing can be nor be conceived without God."