“Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?”

There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.

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

We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts.

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.

I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

A distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man’s imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.

Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

The present is great with the future.

I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.

It’s easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.

Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Your purpose, should always be to know, the whole that was intended to be known.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Compromise and tolerance are magic words. It took me 40 years to become philosophical.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.