The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.
And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.
To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another’s happiness as one’s own.
There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
There is no way in which a simple substance could begin in the course of nature, since it cannot be formed by means of compounding.
Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.
I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.
To love is to place happiness in the heart of another...
Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.
Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
What is is what must be.
For things remain possible, even if God does not choose them. Indeed, even if God does not will something to exist, it is possible for it to exist, since, by its nature, it could exist if God were to will it to exist.
He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.
Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road.
Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited.
In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.
A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.