I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZAlthough 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.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
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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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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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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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There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
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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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Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.
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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.
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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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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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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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There is nothing without reason.
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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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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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To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.
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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 past is pregnant with the present.
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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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The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
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There is no way in which a simple substance could begin in the course of nature, since it cannot be formed by means of compounding.
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Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.
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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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ