Gottfried Leibniz quotes
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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 -
Everything that is possible demands to exist.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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We live in the best of all possible worlds
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. 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 -
There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
[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 -
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 -
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I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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Now this connection or adaption of all created things with each, and of each with all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
...a distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man's imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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The present is great with the future.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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 -
These principles have given me a way of explaining naturally the union or rather the mutual agreement [conformité] of the soul and the organic body. The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony between all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God's making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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 -
To love is to place happiness in the heart of another....
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua ; for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor; and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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I do not believe that a world without evil, preferable in order to ours, is possible; otherwise it would have been preferred. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted. The combination of all the tendencies to the good has produced the best; but as there are goods that are incompatible together, this combination and this result can introduce the destruction of some good, and as a result some evil.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away and we would be able to describe the workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would not contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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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 -
He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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 -
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The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
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 -
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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What is is what must be.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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 -
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Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
..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.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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. It is this way that in mathematics speculative theorems and practical canons are reduced by analysis to definitions, axioms and postulates.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
I agree with you that it is important to examine our presuppositions, throughly and once for all, in order to establish something solid. For I hold that it is only when we can prove all that we bring forward that we perfectly understand the thing under consideration. I know that the common herd takes little pleasure in these researches, but I know also that the common herd take little pains thoroughly to understand things.
-- Gottfried Leibniz -
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The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
-- Gottfried Leibniz
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