Top 91 Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
#1. The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology.
Gottfried Leibniz
#2. I hold that the mark of a genuine idea is that its possibility can be proved, either a priori by conceiving its cause or reason, or a posteriori when experience teaches us that it is in fact in nature.
Gottfried Leibniz
#3. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#4. But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
Gottfried Leibniz
#5. The larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses.
Gottfried Leibniz
#6. There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
Gottfried Leibniz
#7. For things remain possible, even if God does not choose them. Indeed, even if God does not will something to exist, it is possible for it to exist, since, by its nature, it could exist if God were to will it to exist.
Gottfried Leibniz
#8. The greatness of a life can only be estimated by the multitude of its actions. We should not count the years, it is our actions which constitute our life.
Gottfried Leibniz
#9. It follows from what we have just said, that the natural changes of monads come from an internal principle, since an external cause would be unable to influence their inner being.
Gottfried Leibniz
#10. The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to Johann Bernoulli: I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x ...
Gottfried Leibniz
#11. Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
Gottfried Leibniz
#12. It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.
Gottfried Leibniz
#13. Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
Gottfried Leibniz
#14. But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths which distinguishes us from mere animals, and gives us reason and the sciences, raising us to knowledge of ourselves and God. It is this in us which we call the rational soul or mind.
Gottfried Leibniz
#15. When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached.
Gottfried Leibniz
#16. And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.
Gottfried Leibniz
#17. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#18. I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general.
Gottfried Leibniz
#19. Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.
Gottfried Leibniz
#20. Therefore, I have attacted [the problem of the catenary] which I had hitherto not attempted, and with my key [the differential calculus] happily opened its secret.
Acta eruditorum
Gottfried Leibniz
#21. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#22. Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
Gottfried Leibniz
#23. Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
Gottfried Leibniz
#24. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#25. We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.
Gottfried Leibniz
#26. In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.
Gottfried Leibniz
#27. The most perfect society is that whose purpose
is the universal and supreme happiness.
Gottfried Leibniz
#28. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#31. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#32. When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.
Gottfried Leibniz
#33. Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
Gottfried Leibniz
#35. 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?
Gottfried Leibniz
#36. One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.
Gottfried Leibniz
#37. The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
Gottfried Leibniz
#39. Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
Gottfried Leibniz
#40. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#42. There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.
Gottfried Leibniz
#43. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#44. I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.
Gottfried Leibniz
#45. Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.
Gottfried Leibniz
#47. Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.
Gottfried Leibniz
#48. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#49. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#50. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#51. The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.
Gottfried Leibniz
#53. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#54. Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
Gottfried Leibniz
#56. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#57. Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited.
Gottfried Leibniz
#58. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#59. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#60. Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
Gottfried Leibniz
#61. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#63. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#65. Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.
Gottfried Leibniz
#66. God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
Gottfried Leibniz
#67. I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
Gottfried Leibniz
#68. Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.
Gottfried Leibniz
#69. He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
Gottfried Leibniz
#70. Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.
Gottfried Leibniz
#71. Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
Gottfried Leibniz
#73. It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.
Gottfried Leibniz
#74. The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.
Gottfried Leibniz
#76. The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road.
Gottfried Leibniz
#77. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#78. The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.
Gottfried Leibniz
#79. Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.
Gottfried Leibniz
#80. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#81. There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.
Gottfried Leibniz
#82. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#83. The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.
Gottfried Leibniz
#84. It can have its effect only through the intervention of God, inasmuch as in the ideas of God a monad rightly demands that God, in regulating the rest from the beginning of things, should have regard to itself.
Gottfried Leibniz
#85. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.
Gottfried Leibniz
#86. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#87. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#88. Finally there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given; there are also axioms or postulates, or in a word primary principles, which cannot be proved and have no need of proof.
Gottfried Leibniz
#89. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#90. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz
#91. [Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity.
Gottfried Leibniz
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