Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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.
Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.
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.
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.
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts.
The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.
There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.
The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.
Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.
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.
Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.
Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
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.
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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.
The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
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.
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.
It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.
Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.
...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.
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.
Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
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.
It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.
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.
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.
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.