Baruch Spinoza.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

“The more you struggle to live, the less you live. Give up the notion that you must be sure of what you are doing. Instead, surrender to what is real within you, for that alone is sure....you are above everything distressing.”

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”

“No matter how thin you slice it, there will always be two sides.”

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.”

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master.”

“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.”

“In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.”

“None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.”

Ethisc.

“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. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”

“What Paul says about Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter”

“The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.”

“Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.”