Gottfried Leibniz Quotes

The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.

There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies, and souls - in the least part of matter.... Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.

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.

Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul.

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.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

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.

Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.

Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.

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.

If we could sufficiently understand the order of the universe, we should find that it exceeds all the desires of the wisest men, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is, not only as a whole and in general but also for ourselves in particular, if we are attached, as we ought to be, to the Author of all, not only as to the architect and efficient cause of our being, but as to our master and to the final cause, which ought to be the whole aim of our will, and which can alone make our happiness.

He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.

There is nothing without reason.

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.

[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.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.

Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.

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.

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.

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.

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.

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 a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.

Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves.

Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.

All the different classes of beings which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly their essential gradations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection. Thus men are linked with the animals, these with the plants and these with the fossils which in turn merge with those bodies which our senses and our imagination represent to us as absolutely inanimate.

The past is pregnant with the present.

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.

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.

Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.

All things in God are spontaneous.

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.

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.

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.