A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Like many thinkers before him, the young Spinoza came to realize that the alleged benefits of material and social success tend to be short-lived and unpredictable. Moreover, they are invariably accompanied by a variety of evils, including anxiety, envy, and unfulfilled desire. Seeking a more enduring source of satisfaction, he concluded that it was time "to embark on a new way of life."
Steven Nadler, Think Least Of Death: Spinoza On How To Live And How To Die
Spinoza, according to all the seventeenth-century interpreters, rejected all the traditional ideas about God, he was indisputably a heretic. Yet his manner of living was humble and apparently free of vice. then, as now, the philosopher seemed like a living oxymoron: he was an ascetic sensualist, a spiritual materialist, a sociable hermit, a secular saint. How could his life have been so good, the critics asked, when his philosophy was so bad?
Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
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