Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes

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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 Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Progress depends on our sagacity in finding intermediate ideas. Those who are ignorant of algebra cannot imagine the wonderful things that may be done in this field by means of this science. And I do not see that it is easy to determine what new means of perfecting other parts of our knowledge may yet be found out by a penetrating mind.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Those few things having been considered, the whole matter is reduced to pure geometry, which is the one aim of physics and mechanics.

Gottfried Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
Atoms are the effect of the weakness of our imagination, for it likes to rest and therefore hurries to arrive at a conclusion in subdivisions or analyses; this is not the case in Nature, which comes from the infinite and goes to the infinite. Atoms satisfy only the imagination, but they shock the higher reason.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The art of weighing probabilities is not yet even partly explained, though it would be of great importance in legal matters and even in the management business.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
All things in the whole wide world happen mathematically.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The machines of nature, namely, living bodies, are still machines in their smallest parts ad infinitum.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
God, possessing supreme and infinite wisdom, acts in the most perfect manner, not only metaphysically, but also morally speaking, and... with respect to ourselves, we can say that the more enlightened and informed we are about God's works, the more we will be disposed to find them excellent and in complete conformity with what we might have desired.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.

Gottfried Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
Yet I shall not deny that the number of phenomena which are happily explained by a given hypothesis may be so great that it may be taken as morally certain.

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

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Some things cannot be weighed, as having no force and power; some things cannot be measured, by reason of having no parts; but there is nothing which cannot be numbered.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
It 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
There is an old saying that God created everything according to weight, measure and number.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions.

Gottfried Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
[The consequences of] beliefs that go against the providence of a perfectly good, wise, and just God, or against that immortality of souls which lays them open to the operations of justice.... I even find that somewhat similar opinions, by stealing gradually into the minds of men of high station who rule the rest and on whom affairs depend, and by slithering into fashionable books, are inclining everything toward the universal revolution with which Europe is threatened, and are completing the destruction of what still remains in the world of the generous Greeks and Romans who placed love of country and of the public good, and the welfare of future generations before fortune and even before life.

Gottfried Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Gottfried Wilhelm 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 Wilhelm Leibniz
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 Wilhelm Leibniz
There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz