Baruch Spinoza

• 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.
• I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.
• I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
• If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
• In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
• The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.