To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general.
I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology.
It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.
God’s relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.
Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.
We live in the best of all possible worlds.
In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.
But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths which distinguishes us from mere animals, and gives us reason and the sciences, raising us to knowledge of ourselves and God. It is this in us which we call the rational soul or mind.
There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.
Now this connection or adaption of all created things with each, and of each with all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.
TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.