Gottfried Leibniz Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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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 LeibnizSource : "De veritatibus primis". Book by Gottfried Leibniz, 1686.
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“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 LeibnizSource : "A Dialogue". "The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations" edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 170, 2006.
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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 LeibnizSource : "The Elements of True Piety (1677)". "The Shorter Leibniz Texts: A Collection of New Translations" edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 189, 2006.
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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 LeibnizSource : Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1916). “New Essays Concerning Human Understanding with an Appealing...: Transtated from the Original Latin, French and German Writeen”
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“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
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