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 LEIBNIZWhen God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
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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?
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Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.
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He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
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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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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 larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses.
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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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The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
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Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.
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In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.
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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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The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.
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Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
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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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I don’t say that bodies like flint, which are commonly called inanimate, have perceptions and appetition; rather they have something of that sort in them, as worms are in cheese.
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For since it is impossible for a created monad to have a physical influence on the inner nature of another, this is the only way in which one can be dependent on another.
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The past is pregnant with the present.
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To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.
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Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited.
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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.
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The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.
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The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity.
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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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But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
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Therefore, I have attacted [the problem of the catenary] which I had hitherto not attempted, and with my key [the differential calculus] happily opened its secret. Acta eruditorum
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ