God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZThere 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.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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There 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.
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Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
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The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.
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Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul.
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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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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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Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
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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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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.
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Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
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It is a good thing to proceed in order and to establish propositions. This is the way to gain ground and to progress with certainty.
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I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
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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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And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.
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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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To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.
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We live in the best of all possible worlds.
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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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Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.
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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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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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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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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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To love is to take delight in happiness of another, or, what amounts to the same thing, it is to account another’s happiness as one’s own.
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Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.
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