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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZMen 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.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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There is nothing without a reason.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
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Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.
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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 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 LEIBNIZ -
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 -
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 -
But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
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Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.
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The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
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The present is great with the future.
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Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
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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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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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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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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 LEIBNIZ -
We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.
GOTTFRIED 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 LEIBNIZ -
To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ