Spinoza

"He who conceives himself and his actions as free is deceived."

"Pleasure is not virtue; pleasure is a passage to a greater perfection."

"We feel, understand, and know our powerlessness in the face of nature's vastness."

"The essences of individual things are one with the essence of nature."

"Through imagination we form opinions; through reason we understand."

"Jealousy is sadness mixed with the idea of something we love."

"To be free is to act from your own nature, not from external determination."

"The more we live in accordance with reason, the happier we become."

"Pity is sadness joined with the idea of another's misfortune."

"The mind's power of thinking is equal to its power of acting."

"Hatred is always bad, for it diminishes our power of acting."

"Self-preservation is the first law of nature written in every creature's essence."

"The person who thinks deeply understands that death is but a transition."

"Gratitude arises when we recognize that we have received benefits from another."

"To understand God is to understand the infinite power that constitutes existence."

"The mind is eternal in so far as it understands things under the aspect of eternity."

"Ambition grows where reason diminishes."

"All determination is negation; to define something is to exclude something else."

"Existence precedes essence in all finite modes of being."

"The perfection of a thing is determined by its power to act."

"We never desire a thing because we deem it good; rather we deem it good because we desire it."

"Love of anything external to ourselves is unstable, for all external things are impermanent."

"The mind's greatest power is to think all things, to know all things."

"Whatever diminishes or increases our power of acting can be the subject of our desire."

"Peace of mind arises from understanding the necessity of all things."

"He who is always gripped by fear cannot achieve any worthy state of being."

"In understanding our own nature, we understand the nature of all existence."

"The bondage of man is his imagination; his freedom is his reason."

"We call that good which promotes the power of acting; we call that evil which diminishes it."

"Spinoza believed that understanding ourselves requires understanding our place in nature's infinite system."