Top 100 Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
#1. It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.
Hans Reichenbach
#2. Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#9. Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
Gottfried Leibniz
#10. 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
#12. The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.
Gottfried Leibniz
#13. 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
#14. Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
Gottfried Leibniz
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.
Gottfried Leibniz
#19. Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.
Gottfried Leibniz
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#23. It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#24. There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.
Gottfried Leibniz
#25. For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.
Gottfried Leibniz
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.
Gottfried Leibniz
#36. It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.
Gottfried Leibniz
#38. Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
Gottfried Leibniz
#39. There is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#40. Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.
Gottfried Leibniz
#41. He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
Gottfried Leibniz
#42. Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.
Gottfried Leibniz
#43. I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
Gottfried Leibniz
#44. God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
Gottfried Leibniz
#45. Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.
Gottfried Leibniz
#46. For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.
Gottfried Leibniz
#58. 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
#59. But as the late- seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said, 'To be neutral is rather like someone who lives in the middle of a house and is smoked out from below and drenched with urine from above.
Eleanor Herman
#60. 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
#61. Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
Gottfried Leibniz
#62. It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.
Gottfried Leibniz
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge ... it would not be the source of necessary truths ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#68. 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
#69. There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
Gottfried Leibniz
#70. 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
#72. But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
Gottfried Leibniz
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. The means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order ... is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
Gottfried Leibniz
#82. 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
#83. 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
#85. It is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#87. Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
Gottfried Leibniz
#88. 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
#89. The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology.
Gottfried Leibniz
#91. ... if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes ...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#93. 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
#94. The most perfect society is that whose purpose
is the universal and supreme happiness.
Gottfried Leibniz
#95. [...] we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
Gottfried Leibniz
#100. 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
