Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM 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 Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes
-
-
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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
Now this connection or adaption of all created things with each, and of each with all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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 WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
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 WILHELM 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 WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
There is nothing without reason.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ -
..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.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ