“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”Baruch Spinoza · Etica · 1677 · Partea a V-a, propoziția 42 (scholia finală)
If it were easy, it would be common; rarity is what makes things precious.
The line closes the Ethics as an honest warning: the path to wisdom and peace demands sustained effort and is traveled by few. Spinoza does not complain about the difficulty; he uses it as a mark of value. If something were easy, it would already be common, and so no longer precious. The reasoning is simple: scarcity and price travel together. Like a trained body or a mature relationship, self-understanding is built over years, not bought.
Spinoza does not merely say that valuable things are hard to reach. He says something subtler: difficulty is not an obstacle to value, but part of it. Difficulty works as a filter. It does not separate the lucky from the rest, but those who stay from those who quit. Think of learning an instrument. The first months sound terrible, and most people stop there. Whoever continues gains not just a skill, but a different relationship with effort itself. The value lies not in the result, but in the fact that you changed along the way. So the question becomes different: not what deserves effort, but what kind of person you become when effort shapes you.
Passage 2. Spinoza also turns the economic logic of value. What is within everyone's reach is desired by no one, because abundance makes it invisible. That is not snobbery, just a simple mechanism: our attention turns toward what is rare. But Spinoza adds a twist. It is not the rarity of the thing that matters, but the rarity of the person who can reach it. Wisdom is not expensive because it is hidden, but because few people train their mind that long. Think of an old friendship. It is not scarce because friends are hard to find, but because years of presence, resolved conflicts and patience are hard to sustain. So the next question is natural: if the mind trains like a muscle, what exactly trains it, concretely?
Passage 3. Spinoza's answer to the earlier question is surprising: the mind is not trained by willpower, but by understanding. Each clear idea you gain makes the next one easier. Effort is sustained not by stubbornness, but by the pleasure of understanding, which grows as you advance. That is why the long path is not heroic suffering, but a daily practice. Think of someone learning a foreign language with a quarter of an hour a day. Progress seems small, yet every new word makes tomorrow's book more accessible. Years pass, and the person who once read now thinks in another language. One question remains: what keeps you on the path on days when pleasure does not come?
Why it matters An antidote to shortcut culture: it helps you accept that the projects that matter, from study to relationships, are paid for in patience, not tricks.