"Spinoza has long intrigued me, and for years I've wanted to write about this valiant seventeenth-century thinker, so alone in the world—without a family, without a community—who authored books that truly changed the world. He anticipated secularization, the liberal democratic political state, and the rise of natural science, and he paved the way for the Enlightenment. The fact that he was excommunicated by the Jews at the age of twenty-four and censored for the rest of his life by the Christians had always fascinated me, perhaps because of my own iconoclastic proclivities. And this strange sense of kinship with Spinoza was strengthened by the knowledge that Einstein, one of my first heroes, was a Spinozist. When Einstein spoke of God, he spoke of Spinoza's God—a God entirely equivalent to nature, a God that includes all substance, and a God “that doesn't play dice with the universe”—by which he means that everything that happens, without exception, follows the orderly laws of nature."

“Humanam impotentiam in moderandis et coercendis affectibus servitutem voco; homo enim affectibus obnoxius sui juris non est sed fortunæ in cujus potestate ita est ut sæpe coactus sit quanquam meliora sibi videat, deteriora tamen sequi.”

“Meum institutum non est verborum significationem sed rerum naturam explicare”

“Hic conatus aliquid agendi et etiam omittendi ea sola de causa ut hominibus placeamus, vocatur ambitio præsertim quando adeo impense vulgo placere conamur ut cum nostro aut alterius damno quædam agamus vel omittamus; alias humanitas appellari solet.”

“veritas norma sui et falsi est”

“Ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum”

“[B]y Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, that is … God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God's nature, or from God's attributes, that is, all the modes of God's attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God.”