Spinoza

"Active joy is impossible without adequate ideas."

"Despair is the desire that one should be delivered from a greater evil."

"The perfect man must have the power of controlling his passions."

"Reason demands that every individual should love itself."

"The power of the mind is its understanding."

"Anything which is in God must be conceived through God."

"Mind and body are one and the same thing, expressed in two different ways."

"The measure of each one's power of thinking is his power of understanding."

"No one hates who has thoroughly understood and loved."

"In the intellectual love of God the mind is eternal."

"He who possesses a body capable of the greatest number of simultaneous relations possesses a mind capable of perceiving a greater number of things at once."

"The effort by which each thing endeavors to persist in its being is nothing else than the actual essence of the thing itself."

"Existence necessarily follows from the nature of anything."

"The human body is composed of a great number of parts of diverse nature, each requiring continual variety of new things by which they may be restored."

"He who has a true idea simultaneously knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the truth of the thing perceived."

"The more we understand individual things, the more we understand God."

"Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love."

"Human power is very limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes."

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

"The more we are determined by external things, the more we are subject to passions and destruction."

"Nature has not any preference of place; it is the same everywhere."

"In so far as the mind understands all things as necessary, it has a certain power of controlling the affects."

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

"He alone is free who lives solely by the dictate of reason."

"To be determined to action is to live; to cease to be determined is to cease to live."

"If we live among people who are envious and malevolent, we are necessarily affected by their hatred and envy."

"The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but something of it remains eternal."

"Our mind is eternal in so far as it understands things from the perspective of eternity."

"Sadness is man's transition from a greater to a lesser perfection."

"Rejoicing is man's transition from a lesser to a greater perfection."