Gottfried Leibniz Quotes

TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love. ~ 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

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

[Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise. ~ 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

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever? ~ Gottfried Leibniz

It can have its effect only through the intervention of God, inasmuch as in the ideas of God a monad rightly demands that God, in regulating the rest from the beginning of things, should have regard to itself. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

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. ~ Gottfried 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 Leibniz

"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers. ~ Hans Reichenbach

The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

If we could sufficiently understand the order of the universe, we should find that it exceeds all the desires of the wisest men, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is, not only as a whole and in general but also for ourselves in particular, if we are attached, as we ought to be, to the Author of all, not only as to the architect and efficient cause of our being, but as to our master and to the final cause, which ought to be the whole aim of our will, and which can alone make our happiness. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

All things in God are spontaneous. ~ 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

The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

A great doctor kills more people than a great general. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

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. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. ~ 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

God, possessing supreme and infinite wisdom, acts in the most perfect manner, not only metaphysically, but also morally speaking, and ... with respect to ourselves, we can say that the more enlightened and informed we are about God's works, the more we will be disposed to find them excellent and in complete conformity with what we might have desired. ~ Gottfried 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 Leibniz

Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena. ~ Gottfried 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 Leibniz

There is nothing without reason. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

The dot was introduced as a symbol for multiplication by Leibniz. On July 29, 1698, he wrote in a letter to Johann Bernoulli: I do not like X as a symbol for multiplication, as it is easily confounded with x ... ~ Gottfried Leibniz

There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

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. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

To love is to place happiness in the heart of another ... ~ Gottfried Leibniz

The knowledge which we have acquired ought not to resemble a great shop without order, and without an inventory; we ought to know what we possess, and be able to make it serve us in need. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism. ~ Shelby D. Hunt

Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Nature does not make leaps. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

For since it is impossible for a created monad to have a physical influence on the inner nature of another, this is the only way in which one can be dependent on another. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

The past is pregnant with the present. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Finally there are simple ideas of which no definition can be given; there are also axioms or postulates, or in a word primary principles, which cannot be proved and have no need of proof. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

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 Leibniz

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only. ~ 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 present is great with the future. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

The most perfect society is that whose purpose
is the universal and supreme happiness. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

It follows from what we have just said, that the natural changes of monads come from an internal principle, since an external cause would be unable to influence their inner being. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

Our 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. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

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. ~ Gottfried Leibniz

I wanted to be a brain surgeon, but I had a bad habit of dropping things. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

If Bartleby is a new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not. The Tartarus into which Bartleby, the new savior, descends is the deepest level of the Palace of Destinies, that whose sight Leibniz cannot tolerate, the world in which nothing is compossible with anything else, where "nothing exists rather than something. ~ Giorgio Agamben

It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God's "crooked yet straight path" (Gottfried Arnold). They do not want a life that is crooked and balked. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Imaginations and illusions are always so much more powerful and bigger than this mediocre and boring thing called reality. ~ Gottfried Helnwein

I remember being at the premiere of 'Beverly Hills Cop II' and the tremendous reaction from the crowd outside, then going to a party at a hotel afterwards where the speakers were blasting 'Shakedown,' a song from the movie. That felt like a show biz moment to me. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

I found out about Jonathan Winters' death a day after it happened. That seems wrong. A talent like his should be more revered. The world knew about Kim Kardashian's divorce before she did. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

What made such a plan seem workable was that for the early pluralists and their multicultural descendants society would have fewer and fewer traditional groups. The kind of pluralist society that Dewey and Kallen envisaged would go beyond rooted ethnic communities. It would become the evolving creation of "free" individual participants, setting goals under scientific direction and having their material interests monitored by a "conductor state." The world as conceived by pluralists was there to be managed and to be made culturally safe for its framers: Eastern and Central European Jews fearful of traditional Gentile mores and the uprooted descendants of New England Calvinists looking for the New Jerusalem under scientific management. ~ Paul Edward Gottfried

Fermented foods contain natural probiotics, or healthy bacteria, that can take your health to the next level. Nearly every culture has a version of a fermented food: yogurt, kefir, miso, and fermented vegetables, including sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi. ~ Sara Gottfried

Thus we build on the ice, thus we write on the waves of the sea; the waves roaring pass away, the ice melts, and away goes our palace, like our thoughts. ~ Johann Gottfried Herder

Every time I give a straight answer and read it in a magazine, I say, 'Ouch.' One day I'd like to talk to a psychoanalyst about why celebrities reveal so much of themselves in interviews. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

My art is not an answer, it is a question. ~ Gottfried Helnwein

He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia! ~ Gottfried Benn

Note to goyim readers: not every Jew who grew up in Brooklyn was rich. And as long as I'm on it, here's another note: fuck you. That's all. Whether or not you assumed we were rich, if you're a goyim, fuck you. But keep reading, and tell your friends to buy the book. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

A human life is a schooling for eternity. ~ Gottfried Keller

Well, I'm eventually gonna take the Daryl Hannah parts. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

If pure philosophy took any of its ideas from Christian revelation, if anything in the Bible and the Gospel has passed into metaphysics, if, in short, it is inconceivable that the system of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz would be what in fact they are had they been altogether withdrawn from Christian influence, then it becomes, highly probable that since the influence of Christianity on philosophy was a reality, the concept of Christian philosophy is not without a real meaning. ~ Etienne Gilson

It is greatly understated to compare humans to an absorbent sponge, a glowing fuse; they are each an innumerable harmony, a living self that has an effect on all of the forces that surround them. ~ Johann Gottfried Herder

Leibniz endeavored to provide an account of inference and judgment involving the mechanical play of symbols and very little else. The checklists that result are the first of humanity's intellectual artifacts. They express, they explain, and so they ratify a power of the mind. And, of course, they are artifacts in the process of becoming algorithms. ~ David Berlinski

I've never been one of those who wanted to fill my calendar up 90 percent of the time. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

Unfortunately, I've never been mistaken as Johnny Depp. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

Have you never observed that children will sometimes, of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them? Which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings? Which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground? ~ Johann Gottfried Herder

One pleasant surprise was when I interviewed Butch Patrick. I was expecting this bitter old drunk, and instead he had a total sense of humor about his career and his drinking and drug problem. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You - Rudy - and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us - it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way. ~ Neal Stephenson

Any misfortune that happens to another person is funny. If it happens to someone else and not me, it's very funny. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

What do Japanese Jews love to eat? Hebrew National Tsunami. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

You can say "ass," but you can't say "asshole." That's why I always cringe when a character in a TV show refers to someone as an "ass." Unless you're British, calling someone an ass really doesn't work. But those are the rules of television. You can be a dirtbag, but not a scumbag. ~ Gilbert Gottfried

There are so many today who are given to judging the good bad and the bad good. They act not to right but to cross purpose. ~ Gottfried Von Straßburg

In this world, darkness is always looming on the horizon. At Gottfried, instead of avoiding the dark, we meet it head on ...
do the same with your studies and with every obstacle you face in the future. Do not accept the confines of the world as you perceive it.
Instead, look for what you cannot see. There are universes among us, within us. Our only way out of darkness is to learn how to see WITHOUT light. ~ Yvonne Woon

Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man's uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity - to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls." Roger ~ Neal Stephenson

Night is nature's protest against the leprosy of civilization, Gottfried. No decent man can withstand it for long. He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and unconscious life. ~ Erich Maria Remarque