“It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind’s labour.”

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.

Nature does not make leaps.

I admire Peter Mandleson’s chutzpah and the way he transformed the Labour party but not his dubious ideas about Europe and industrial policy.

Labour want to control all parts of the economy and society so that they can pursue the politics of envy. It would leave us all paying higher taxes and the economy in tatters.

Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue.

The ceaseless labour of your life is to build the house of death.

We only labor to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the understanding unfurnished and void.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.

We need people like me in the Labour party.