“"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." These words which bring to a close Spinoza's masterpiece Ethics, after the manner of Geometry, sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult.”
Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 37: Chapter 2. Benedict de Spinoza, 1632-1677
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Edgar A. Singer, Jr.10
American philosopher 1873–1954Related quotes
“Needs must it be hard, since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
Et sane arduum debet esse, quod adeo raro reperitur. Qui enim posset fieri, si salus in promptu esset et sine magno labore reperiri posset, ut ab omnibus fere negligeretur? Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt.
Baruch Spinoza book Ethics
Part V, Prop. XLII, Scholium
Ethics (1677)
Simone Weil book Waiting for God
Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God
Source: Waiting for God
John Holt book How Children Learn
How Children Learn (1967).
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 189.
“Ethics and honesty, [are] rare amongst scholars working on the Indian past.”
Shereen Ratnagar Indian archaeologist
quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.
Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer
“Fine Writing,” p. 308
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
G - L, Jonathan Israel