Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes

The means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest possible order ... is the means of obtaining as much perfection as possible.

It is true that as the empty voids and the dismal wilderness belong to zero, so the spirit of God and His light belong to the all-powerful One.

For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.

And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.

The present is big with the future.

... every feeling is the perception of a truth ...

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.

Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary.

Perceptions which are at present insensible may grow some day: nothing is useless, and eternity provides great scope for change.

... for although people can be made worse off by all other gifts, correct reasoning alone can only be for the good.

When the origin of remote peoples goes beyond history, our languages show themselves their oldest monuments

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge ... it would not be the source of necessary truths ...

It is true that the more we see some connection in what happens to us, the more we are confirmed in the opinion we have about the reality of our appearances; and it is also true that the more we examine our appearances closely, the more we find them well-sequenced, as microscopes and other aids in making experiments have shown us.

... if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes ...

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.
(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)

I have so many ideas that may perhaps be of some use in time if others more penetrating than I go deeply into them someday and join the beauty of their minds to the labour of mine.

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.

It is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God ...

There is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands.