Baruch Spinoza Quotes

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

I think a lot of people are curious about what makes people do what they do, and I guess my curiosity isn't hidden in any way.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

People and nations act on the basis of what they feel rather than what is real.

It is what men think that determines how they act

People act on what they want more often than what they need.

If what the philosophers say be true, that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage.

There is always a gap between intention and action.

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.

There are more reasons for people's actions than the number of actions that are actually set in motion.

What people CAN do is very different from what they WILL do.

Every human action, whether it has become positive or negative, must depend on motivation.

Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.

Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear.

Action helps you think and raises your self-esteem. Good luck happens when you're in action. Ask yourself, "Does this go toward or away from what I want?" There's an animal in us, and it has great instincts. Scan for a desire and follow it. Set a goal, any goal, and start doing everything you can think of to achieve it.

But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

There appears to be but two grand master passions or movers in the human mind, namely, love and pride. And what constitutes the beauty or deformity of a man's character is the choice he makes under which banner he determines to enlist himself. But there is a strong distinction between different degress in the same thing and a mixture of two contraries.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

The appearance of things to the mind is the standard of every action to man.

Love has no resistance. Whatever we do is because we want to do it.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

What to ourselves in passion we propose, The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.

Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.