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.Collection: Truth
Whence it follows that God is absolutely perfect, since perfection is nothing but magnitude of positive reality, in the strict sense, setting aside the limits or bounds in things which are limited.Collection: Positive
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.Collection: Music
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.
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.
I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.
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.
Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.
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.
But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.
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.
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.
Everything that is possible demands to exist.Collection: Demand
Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.Collection: Philosophy
The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.Collection: Past
The greatness of a life can only be estimated by the multitude of its actions. We should not count the years, it is our actions which constitute our life.Collection: Greatness
Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.Collection: Needs
To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.Collection: Life
Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.Collection: Soul
He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.Collection: Sweet
To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Love Is
Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.Collection: Acting
The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.Collection: Machines
I do not believe that a world without evil, preferable in order to ours, is possible; otherwise it would have been preferred. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted. The combination of all the tendencies to the good has produced the best; but as there are goods that are incompatible together, this combination and this result can introduce the destruction of some good, and as a result some evil.Collection: Believe
It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.Collection: Wise
Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.Collection: Reason
There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.Collection: Philosophical
Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.Collection: Intellectual
Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.Collection: Exercise
A great doctor kills more people than a great general.Collection: Death
Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.Collection: Justice
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.Collection: Nature
The words 'Here you can find perfect peace' can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.Collection: Perfect
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.Collection: Perfect
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.Collection: Reality
Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Order
There is nothing without reason.Collection: Reason
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.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Science
The past is pregnant with the present.Collection: Past