Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gottfried Leibniz
Age: 70 †
Born: 1646
Born: July 1
Died: 1716
Died: November 14
Archivist
Biologist
Diplomat
Diplomatician
Engineer
Geologist
Historian
Jurist
Librarian
Mathematician
Music Theorist
Musicologist
West Point
New York
Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Freiherr Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
Leibnitz
Present
Dictionaries
Term
Conversely
Words
Dictionary
Making
Sciences
Science
Defining
Cannot
Evident
Without
Explain
Time
Terms
Incursions

More quotes by Gottfried Leibniz

Image
...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
Image
In symbols one observes an advantage in discovery which is greatest when they express the exact nature of a thing briefly and, as it were, picture it then indeed the labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
There is no way in which a simple substance could begin in the course of nature, since it cannot be formed by means of compounding.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is nothing without reason.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
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
Image
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.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies, and souls - in the least part of matter.... Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
Either there are no corporeal substances, and bodies are merely phenomena which are true or consistent with each other, such as a rainbow or a perfectly coherent dream, or there is in all corporeal substances something analogous to the soul.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
Indeed in general I hold that there is nothing truer than happiness, and nothing happier and sweeter than truth.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
The present is great with the future.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
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
Image
The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.
Gottfried Leibniz
Image
Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. 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.
Gottfried Leibniz