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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZAnd there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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When 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.
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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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I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
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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.
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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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Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul.
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There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.
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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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What is what must be.
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There is nothing without reason.
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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
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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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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 world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.
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The present is great with the future.
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There is a world of created beings – living things, animals, entelechies, and souls – in the least part of matter…. Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
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Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
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Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.
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He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.
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The greatness of a life can only be estimated by the multitude of its actions. We should not count the years, it is our actions which constitute our life.
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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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Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.
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For things remain possible, even if God does not choose them. Indeed, even if God does not will something to exist, it is possible for it to exist, since, by its nature, it could exist if God were to will it to exist.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
It is a good thing to proceed in order and to establish propositions. This is the way to gain ground and to progress with certainty.
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Now this connection or adaption of all created things with each, and of each with all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
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Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ