“He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.”

I don’t say that bodies like flint, which are commonly called inanimate, have perceptions and appetition; rather they have something of that sort in them, as worms are in cheese.

Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.

There is nothing without reason.

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.

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

In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.

I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.

The present is great with the future.

Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.

I also take it as granted that every created thing, and consequently the created monad also, is subject to change, and indeed that this change is continual in each one.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

The past is pregnant with the present.

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.

What is what must be.

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 knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.

I swear this life is like the sweetest thing I’ve ever known.

Memories, pressed between the pages of my mind. Memories, sweetened through the ages just like wine.

How sweet to be a Cloud. Floating in the Blue!

As long as you’re in the food business, why not make sweets?

Sweet is a grief well ended.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.

For wherein is life sweet to him who suffers grief?