“Of what use would it be to you, sir, to become King of China on condition that you forgot what you have been? Would it not be the same as if God, at the same time he destroyed you, created a King in China?”

God’s relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.

To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.

It is a good thing to proceed in order and to establish propositions. This is the way to gain ground and to progress with certainty.

Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.

To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another’s happiness as one’s own.

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.

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

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.

It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.

We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

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

Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.