Gottfried Leibniz Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

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

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

Nature does not make leaps.

Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.

Nothing is more important than to see the sources of invention which are, in my opinion more interesting than the inventions themselves.

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away and we would be able to describe the workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would not contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

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

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

There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.

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

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.

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.

Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.

There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible, and those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary its reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths until we reach those which are primitive.

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.

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

All things in God are spontaneous.

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.

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

Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.

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.