The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate.

It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

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.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.