Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Reason Quotes

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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
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 of God. It is this in us which we call the rational soul or Mind.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
It is God who is the ultimate reason of things, and the knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of beings.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

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
There 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 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
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
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
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
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
God forbid; we should have neither science nor law, nay, not even reason.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz