The past is pregnant with the present.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZMusic is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
More Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes
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Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
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There never is absolute birth nor complete death, in the strict sense, consisting in the separation of the soul from the body. What we call births are developments and growths, while what we call deaths are envelopments and diminutions.
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Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
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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.
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God’s relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.
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We live in the best of all possible worlds.
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There is no way in which a simple substance could begin in the course of nature, since it cannot be formed by means of compounding.
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One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms.
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Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.
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Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
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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.
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The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need.
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The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.
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Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.
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It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind’s labour.
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But 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 God. It is this in us which we call the rational soul or mind.
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To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another’s happiness as one’s own.
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The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
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The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.
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There is nothing without reason.
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The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.
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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.
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Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
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Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.
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Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ