Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes

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

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

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.

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

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. Thus the habit of loving someone is nothing other than BENEVOLENCE by which we want the good of others, not for the profit that we gain from it, but because it is agreeable to us in itself.
CHARITY is a general benevolence. And JUSTICE is charity in accordance with wisdom. … so that one does not do harm to someone without necessity, and that one does as much good as one can, but especially where it is best employed.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
I do not believe that a world without evil, preferable in order to ours, is possible; otherwise it would have been preferred. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

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
Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.

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
For, above all, I hold a notion of possibility and necessity according to which there are some things that are possible, but yet not necessary, and which do not really exist. From this it follows that a reason that always forces a free mind to choose one thing over another (whether that reason derives from the perfection of a thing, as it does in God, or from our imperfection) does not eliminate our freedom.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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.

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

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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.

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
The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.

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
Everything that is possible demands to exist.

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
Theologian: But what is to love?
Philosopher: To be delighted by the happiness of another.

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
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 Wilhelm Leibniz