“To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.”

The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.

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

There is a world of created beings – living things, animals, entelechies, and souls – in the least part of matter…. Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.

Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.

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

Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

For since it is impossible for a created monad to have a physical influence on the inner nature of another, this is the only way in which one can be dependent on another.

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.

The children gazed in delight. Nothing but trees and birds and little wild animals. Oh, what a secret island, all for their very own, to live on and play on.

Sensual is everything that refers to the delight of the senses. And that’s what artists do, is stimulate the senses in any possible way.

Our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?

Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.