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 LEIBNIZThere 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.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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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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The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.
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A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
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Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.
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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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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 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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It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind’s labour.
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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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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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It’s easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.
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This is why the ultimate reason of things must lie in a necessary substance, in which the differentiation of the changes only exists eminently as in their source; and this is what we call God.
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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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I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.
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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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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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There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.
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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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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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Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
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What is what must be.
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There is nothing without a reason.
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I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.
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Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.
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In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.
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