Baruch Spinoza Quotes

... no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp.

What difference, if you are mistaken? For if I am mistaken, I am. For he who is not, assuredly cannot be mistaken; and therefore I am, if I am mistaken. Therefore because I am if I am mistaken, how am I mistaken that I am, when it is sure that I am, if I am mistaken.

To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe.

Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

No human being will ever know the Truth, for even if they happen to say it by chance, they would not even known they had done so.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

We'd all like to be certain of what we know, but I think the most important question is to ask yourself do you really know what you know?

I say this all the time: All I know is I know nothing at all.

Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.

By doubting we come to questioning, and by questioning we perceive the truth.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

... I distrust manifest knowledge.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.

Belief in truth begins with doubting all that has hitherto been believed to be true.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)