“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.”

..This is why the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the differentiation of the changes only exists eminently as in their source; and this is what we call God.

Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.

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

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.

There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.

The past is pregnant with the present.

Everything that is possible demands to exist.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

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.

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.

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.

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 words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.

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

It is God who is the ultimate reason things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.

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

I have friends whose society is delightful to me; they are persons of all countries and of all ages; distinguished in war, in council, and in letters; easy to live with, always at my command.

The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.

The pleasures of humility are really the most refined, inward, and exquisite delights in the world.

As God delights in his own beauty, he must necessarily delight in the creature’s holiness which is a conformity to and participation of it, as truly as [the] brightness of a jewel, held in the sun’s beams, is a participation or derivation of the sun’s brightness, though immensely less in degree.

Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude.

Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God.

Spiritual delight in God arises chiefly from his beauty and perfection, not from the blessings he gives us.

Some time all kinds of letters will be published to the ineffable delight of endless readers.