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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZEach 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.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
-
-
The past is pregnant with the present.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Nature does not make leaps.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
We may say, that not only the soul (the mirror of an indestructible universe) is indestructible, but also the animal itself is, although its mechanism is frequently destroyed in parts.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ -
The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ