Daily Inspiration Quote by Baruch Spinoza

Spinoza is preemptively disarming the oldest heckle in public life: If it were true, more people would believe it. He treats majority opinion not as a jury but as weather - widespread, influential, and often irrelevant to the question of truth. The line’s calm imperative ("Be not astonished") is doing strategic work. It reframes novelty as a psychological problem in the audience rather than a defect in the idea. Your surprise, Spinoza implies, is a bias, not a refutation.

The subtext is autobiography with teeth. Spinoza wrote as a thinker excommunicated from his Jewish community and viewed with suspicion by Christian authorities, publishing with caution in a Dutch Republic that was tolerant until it wasn’t. In that climate, "not accepted by many" wasn’t a harmless fact; it was a warning label that could bring social ruin or worse. His point is less romantic celebration of the lone genius than a sober memo about epistemic politics: truth and acceptance travel at different speeds because acceptance is governed by fear, habit, and institutions.

Stylistically, the sentence is almost annoyingly reasonable, which is the power move. No grand metaphors, no righteous thunder - just a clinical separation of categories. Spinoza invites you to notice how crowds confer legitimacy, then quietly refuses the premise that legitimacy equals accuracy. It’s a defense of intellectual courage, but also a call for emotional discipline: don’t let astonishment do the job of thinking.