Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Soul Quotes

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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
Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough.

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
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.

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
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
If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz