The Spinoza Problem Quotes
"It is the mind that determines what is fearful, worthless, desirable, or priceless, and therefore it is the mind, and only the mind, that must be altered."
"Such goals are breeders. Each time a goal is attained, it merely breeds additional needs. Thus more scurrying, more seeking, ad infinitum."
"Perhaps, then, it is time to think about pedagogical methods. Have you teaching experience?"
"I submit that God has no wishes about how, or even if, we glorify Him."
"I know of this man and would like to meet him. But we could never converse. I know no Greek."
"The time has come for you not only to know of Aristotle but to know him yourself."
"I only know that it does not lie in perishable objects. It lies not outside but within."
"It is a good conscience, not a bad reputation, that matters."
"There must be something in the particular reader that leaps out to embrace the book. His life, his psychology, his image of himself."
"It’s harder to hate an individual than a race."
"Love is the center of Jesus’s message. Not only loving God but loving your neighbor as yourself."
"He who loves God rightly must not desire God to love him in return."
"Let your love flow, and do not let it be influenced by the idea of the love you may get in return."
"Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other."
"If triangles could think they would fashion God after their own shapes."
"It is not what you believe or say you believe, it is how you live that matters."
"Every Marrano who leaves Portugal is disoriented, has to be newly educated to become a Jew again."
"The ancient Greeks understood this error. Two thousand years ago, a wise man named Xenophanes wrote that if oxen, lions, and horses had hands with which to carve images, they would fashion God after their own shapes and give him bodies like their own."
"The error of assuming that God is a living, thinking being, a being in our image, a being who thinks like us, a being who thinks about us."
"The sight of his own room, virtually unchanged after so many years, brought an expression of childlike glee to his face."
"Home was much as he recalled it, and such persistence of the past offered Alfred a rare respite from his tormented sense of rootlessness."
"The Bible’s central message about God, I believe, is that He is perfect, complete, and possesses absolute wisdom."
"And since He created us out of his own substance, His purpose for all of us—who, again, are part of God’s substance—is to find happiness and blessedness."
"The greatest good is to attain ataraxia through freedom from all anxiety."
"Epicurus is shocking to today’s readers because his formula for happiness pays so little attention to the Divine."
"The strength of a belief has no relationship to its veracity."
"Home is not a place—it’s a state of mind. Really being at home is feeling at home in your own skin."
"For me I cannot imagine tranquility sprouting from the soil of hypocrisy."
"How can inner harmony be present if one is untrue to oneself?"
"The same can be said for the book of Judges. No one can possibly believe that each judge wrote the book bearing his name."
"Miracles exist only through man’s ignorance."
"There is no eternal blessedness in the world to come because there is no world to come."
"The mind cannot persist after the body dies."
"I have reached the conclusion that rituals of our community have nothing to do with divine law, nothing to do with blessedness and virtue and love, and everything to do with civic tranquility and perpetuation of rabbinical authority."
"True piety consists in justice, charity, and love of one’s neighbor."
"I shall follow no power on earth other than my own conscience."
"It is only through reason that we can know God, and this quest is the only true source of blessedness in this life."
"Weak and greedy people in adversity use prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God."
"The pomp and ceremony invested in religion clogs the mind of men with dogmatism, crowds out sound reason leaving not enough room for even a modicum of doubt."
"Indeed their faith may be disturbingly unsettled."
"Soon he was given the responsibility of editing most of the work submitted to the paper. Within weeks, Alfred’s red pencil moved lightning fast as he skillfully elevated the style and intensity of others’ work."
"You remember, of course, that when we decided to turn the party from a Thule members’ debating society into an active political party with open meetings, we had to apply to the army for permission?"
"It was a wild tantrum, and he looked like a madman on the brink of losing all control."
"I urge an anti-Semitism based on fact, not emotions. Emotional anti-Semitism leads only to ineffective pogroms."
"The Jewish germ must be eradicated. Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus."
"To speak frankly, Herr Drexler, our small size is, for me, an advantage, not a disadvantage."
"A good warrior must stop sometimes to sharpen his weapons. Not true?"
"And after your bar mitzvah, then you’ll lay tefillin every morning for the rest of your life except for..."
"The Jews everywhere worshipped not golden idols but idols of paper and ink."