#BaruchSpinoza

“Excommunicated at twenty-three with the fiercest curse his community could write, he ground lenses for a living, refused a professorship to stay free, and built — proposition by proposition, like geometry — the most radical philosophical system of his century.”

“There is only one infinite substance — call it God, call it Nature — and everything, including you, is a mode of it; freedom is not escaping necessity but understanding it.”