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 LEIBNIZThe 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.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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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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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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There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
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Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
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The present is great with the future.
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I also take it as granted that every created thing, and consequently the created monad also, is subject to change, and indeed that this change is continual in each one.
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To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.
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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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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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If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.
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It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.
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I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
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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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God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
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It is God who is the ultimate reason things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.
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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 most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
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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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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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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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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.
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Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
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The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
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Nature does not make leaps.
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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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A distinction must be made between true and false ideas, and that too much rein must not be given to a man’s imagination under pretext of its being a clear and distinct intellection.
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