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I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration.

Gottfried Leibniz

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Gottfried Leibniz
Age: 70 †
Born: 1646
Born: July 1
Died: 1716
Died: November 14
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Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz
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Freiherr Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz
Leibnitz
Prove
Hold
Understand
Everything
Thing
Assert
Consideration
Perfectly

More quotes by Gottfried Leibniz

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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
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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
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He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.
Gottfried Leibniz
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I am so in favor of the actual infinite that instead of admitting that Nature abhors it, as is commonly said, I hold that Nature makes frequent use of it everywhere, in order to show more effectively the perfections of its Author.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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
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Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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.
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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God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
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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All things in God are spontaneous.
Gottfried Leibniz
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The past is pregnant with the present.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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.
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
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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.
Gottfried Leibniz
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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
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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
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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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Therefore, I have attacted [the problem of the catenary] which I had hitherto not attempted, and with my key [the differential calculus] happily opened its secret. Acta eruditorum
Gottfried Leibniz
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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