"Nothing is more absurd than ownership claimed for ideas. Hegel did, to be sure, use many of Schelling's ideas for his philosophy, but Mr. Schelling would never have known what to do with these ideas anyway. He always just philosophized, but was never able to produce a philosophy. And besides, one could certainly maintain that Mr. Schelling borrowed more from Spinoza than Hegel borrowed from Schelling. If Spinoza is some day liberated from his rigid, antiquated Cartesian, mathematical form and made accessible to a large public, we shall perhaps see that he, more than any other, might complain about the theft of ideas. All our present‑day philosophers, possibly without knowing it, look through glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground."
React to this quote
More by Baruch Spinoza
See allResonant Thoughts
"First, Greece: for modem Greeks, as I intimated, the future could mirror ‘the past’ past’ in more than one way, since there was a clear split in that past. One school argued for the Byzantine roots an…"
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and …"
— Eckhart Tolle"The time has passed for argument. Nothing more need be said. For a long time it has been clear that colored…"
— Charles Sumner"No one is admitted into the Ashram of the Christ until such time as he is beginning to think and live in te…"
— Alice Bailey"If the world had attended me after World War II, it would have been united within seven years, and there wo…"
— Sun Myung Moon"For all of us, explicit memory makes it possible to leap across space and time and conjure up events and em…"
— Eric Kandel"You know why I go to museums on my day off? It restores my sense of Western Civilization, of History—it giv…"
— Michael Savage