But it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths which distinguishes us from mere animals, and gives us reason and the sciences, raising us to knowledge of ourselves and God. It is this in us which we call the rational soul or mind.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZOur reasonings are grounded upon two great principles, that of contradiction, in virtue of which we judge false that which involves a contradiction, and true that which is opposed or contradictory to the false.
More Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes
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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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Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.
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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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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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What is is what must be.
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There is nothing without reason.
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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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He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
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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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It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
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Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.
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Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.
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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 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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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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All things in God are spontaneous.
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He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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The present is great with the future.
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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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Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ