Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZThe monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.
More Gottfried Leibniz Quotes
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Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.
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There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.
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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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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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He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
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But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
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God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
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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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Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.
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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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We live in the best of all possible worlds.
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I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
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The larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses.
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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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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.
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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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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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Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.
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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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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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A great doctor kills more people than a great general.
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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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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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There is nothing without reason.
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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.
GOTTFRIED LEIBNIZ