“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.”

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.

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.

I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.

The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of deciphering, in which an ingenious conjecture often greatly shortens the road.

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.

There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

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.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.

Through knowledge we behold the world’s creation, How in his cradle first he fostered was; And judge of Nature’s cunning operation, How things she formed of a formless mass.

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

Did you know, in the entire universe, we are the only intelligent life forms thought to have a Miss Universe contest?

If A denotes one of the two constant traits, for example, the dominating one, a the recessive, and the Aa the hybrid form in which both are united, then the expression: gives the series for the progeny of plants hybrid in a pair of differing traits.