Baruch Spinoza Quotes

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.

... if you're someone who knows the worst thing can happen at any time, aren't you also someone who knows the best thing can happen at any time too?

Life is a free fall parachute jump. Pray all the way down and hope for a safe landing.

Hope! fortune's cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!

You will not think it unnatural that those who have an object depending, which strongly engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat inclining to superstition.

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary.

Fear first created the gods.

The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.

Hope knows not if fear speaks truth, nor fear whether hope be blind as she.

You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.

Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.

Fate rules the affairs of men, with no recognizable order.

It's a "keep your fingers crossed" business, the entertainment business.

We must expect everything and fear everything from time and from men.

Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.

Fate. You could never anticipate it.

If the next car passed is blue, Violet will be okay, she thought. If it's red, A will do something horrible to her. She heard a growl of an engine and shut her eyes, afraid to see what the future might hold. She'd never cared so much about anything in her life. Just as the car was passing, she opened her eyes and saw a Mercedes hood ornament. She let out a long sigh, tears coming to her eyes once more. The car was blue.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

For out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways or reason.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

‎Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident