Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

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

Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul.

He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.

All things in God are spontaneous.

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.

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.