Baruch Spinoza Quotes

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

There is no rational creature which is not capable both of good and evil

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

I believe firmly that in making ethical decisions, man has the prerogative of true freedom of choice.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.

Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.

No intelligent man believes that anybody ever willingly errs or willingly does base and evil deeds; they are well aware that all who do base and evil things do them unwillingly.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.