Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZThe most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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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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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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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.
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To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.
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Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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All things in God are spontaneous.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Everything that is possible demands to exist.
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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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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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ