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 pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.
The past is pregnant with the present.
Of what use would it be to you, sir, to become King of China on condition that you forgot what you have been? Would it not be the same as if God, at the same time he destroyed you, created a King in China?
We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.
Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.
Nature does not make leaps.
Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
It is God who is the ultimate reason things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.
All things in God are spontaneous.
The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.
Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.
When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.
Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
I don’t say that bodies like flint, which are commonly called inanimate, have perceptions and appetition; rather they have something of that sort in them, as worms are in cheese.
Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.
It’s easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.
Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.