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 LeibnizThere is no argument so cogent not only in demonstrating, the indestructibility of the soul, but also in showing that it always preserves in its nature traces of all its preceding states with a practical remembrance which can always be aroused. Since it has the consciousness of or knows in itself what each one calls his me. This renders it open to moral qualities, to chastisement and to recompense even after this life, for immortality without remembrance would be of no value.
Gottfried LeibnizMusic is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
Gottfried LeibnizIn 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 LeibnizIt has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends.
Gottfried LeibnizThere are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in.
Gottfried Leibniz