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.

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

To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another's happiness as one's own.

God's relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.

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.

The past is pregnant with the present.

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.