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 LEIBNIZThe most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
More Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes
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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 -
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
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We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts.
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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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
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Everything that is possible demands to exist.
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A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.
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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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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.
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Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
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Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
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I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
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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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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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He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
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In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it; then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.
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Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.
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Our reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
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The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of deciphering, in which an ingenious conjecture often greatly shortens the road.
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It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
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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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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