The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology.
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.
There is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands.
Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.
Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.
If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.
The means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order... is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.
He who does not act does not exist.
Perceptions which are at present insensible may grow some day: nothing is useless, and eternity provides great scope for change.
This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.
It is true that the more we see some connection in what happens to us, the more we are confirmed in the opinion we have about the reality of our appearances; and it is also true that the more we examine our appearances closely, the more we find them well-sequenced, as microscopes and other aids in making experiments have shown us.
And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.
For all bodies are in perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are passing in and out of them continually.
I have so many ideas that may perhaps be of some use in time if others more penetrating than I go deeply into them someday and join the beauty of their minds to the labour of mine.
It is true that as the empty voids and the dismal wilderness belong to zero, so the spirit of God and His light belong to the all-powerful One.
I don’t really eliminate body, but reduce it to what it is. For I show that corporeal mass, which is thought to have something over and above simple substances, is not a substance, but a phenomenon resulting from simple substances, which alone have unity and absolute reality.
When the origin of remote peoples goes beyond history, our languages show themselves their oldest monuments.