Baruch Spinoza Quotes

We have these words 'space' and 'time,' but you can't touch them. They're not objects, they're not things, they go forever. Space and time are really tools of animal sense perception, the way we organize and construct information.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

There are many levels of truth.

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

I'm not interested in observed reality.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Truth is an illusory notion.

Gosh, for me, when I was 15 or 16 years old, I was just starting to understand ideas and film and things like that. And then, you go see a movie like 'The Matrix' that absolutely blows your mind. It's not just trying to entertain you, but it's also trying to explore something about human nature and ask some really deep questions.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

To the critical intelligence, nothing is left of absolute reality.

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

The world is my representation

The table I write on I say exists ... meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.

This whole world is mind's world, the product of the mind.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?