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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.

Gottfried Leibniz

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Gottfried Leibniz
Age: 70 †
Born: 1646
Born: July 1
Died: 1716
Died: November 14
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Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
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If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form for it is of the same genus, though a different species.
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The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
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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.
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God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
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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.
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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
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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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Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.
Gottfried Leibniz
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I have seen something of the project of M. de St. Pierre, for maintaining a perpetual peace in Europe. I am reminded of a device in a cemetery, with the words: Pax perpetua for the dead do not fight any longer: but the living are of another humor and the most powerful do not respect tribunals at all.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?
Gottfried Leibniz
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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