According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.

In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.

The present is great with the future.

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.

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.

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

Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.