Quotes & Sayings About Leibniz

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

If pure philosophy took any of its ideas from Christian revelation, if anything in the Bible and the Gospel has passed into metaphysics, if, in short, it is inconceivable that the system of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz would be what in fact they are had they been altogether withdrawn from Christian influence, then it becomes, highly probable that since the influence of Christianity on philosophy was a reality, the concept of Christian philosophy is not without a real meaning. — Etienne Gilson

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

The Industrial Revolution was based on two grand concepts that were profound in their simplicity. Innovators came up with ways to simplify endeavors by breaking them into easy, small tasks that could be accomplished on assembly lines. Then, beginning in the textile industry, inventors found ways to mechanize steps so that they could be performed by machines, many of them powered by steam engines. Babbage, building on ideas from Pascal and Leibniz, tried to apply these two processes to the production of computations, creating a mechanical precursor to the modern computer. His most significant conceptual leap was that such machines did not have to be set to do only one process, but instead could be programmed and reprogrammed through the use of punch cards. Ada saw the beauty and significance of that enchanting notion, and she also described an even more exciting idea that derived from it: such machines could process not only numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols. — Walter Isaacson

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting. — Gottfried Leibniz

Nature does not make leaps. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

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

The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed. — Robert Trout

God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts. — Gottfried Leibniz

Of what use would it be to you, sir, to become King of China on condition that you forgot what you have been? Would it not be the same as if God, at the same time he destroyed you, created a King in China? — Gottfried Leibniz

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

There are also two kinds of truths, those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible. When a truth is necessary, reason can be found by analysis, resolving it into more simple ideas and truths, until we come to those which are primary. — Gottfried Leibniz

Ultimately, Leibniz argued, there are only two absolutely simple concepts, God and Nothingness. From these, all other concepts may be constructed, the world, and everything within it, arising from some primordial argument between the deity and nothing whatsoever. And then, by some inscrutable incandescent insight, Leibniz came to see that what is crucial in what he had written is the alternation between God and Nothingness. And for this, the numbers 0 and 1 suffice. — David Berlinski

We never have a full demonstration, although there is always an underlying reason for the truth, even if it is only perfectly understood by God, who alone penetrated the infinite series in one stroke of the mind. — Gottfried Leibniz

It is not always the most brilliant speculations nor the choice of the most exotic materials that is most profitable. I prefer Monsieur de Reaumur busy exterminating moths by means of an oily fleece; or increasing fowl production by making them hatch without the help of their mothers, than Monsieur Bemouilli absorbed in algebra, or Monsieur Leibniz calculating the various advantages and disadvantages of the possible worlds. — Noel-Antoine Pluche

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

Leibniz never married; he had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. — Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part. — Richard Courant

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

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers. — Hans Reichenbach

The present is great with the future. — Gottfried Leibniz

I agree with you that it is important to examine our presuppositions, throughly and once for all, in order to establish something solid. For I hold that it is only when we can prove all that we bring forward that we perfectly understand the thing under consideration. I know that the common herd takes little pleasure in these researches, but I know also that the common herd take little pains thoroughly to understand things. — Gottfried Leibniz

A great doctor kills more people than a great general. — Gottfried Leibniz

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

When God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God. — Gottfried Leibniz

Leibniz was somewhat mean about money. When any young lady at the court of Hanover married, he used to give her what he called a "wedding present," consisting of useful maxims, ending up with the advice not to give up washing now that she had secured a husband. History does not record whether the brides were grateful. — Bertrand Russell

If we could sufficiently understand the order of the universe, we should find that it exceeds all the desires of the wisest men, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is, not only as a whole and in general but also for ourselves in particular, if we are attached, as we ought to be, to the Author of all, not only as to the architect and efficient cause of our being, but as to our master and to the final cause, which ought to be the whole aim of our will, and which can alone make our happiness. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times. — Gottfried Leibniz

[...] we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics. — Neal Stephenson

G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?"[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God — William Lane Craig

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

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

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz endeavored to provide an account of inference and judgment involving the mechanical play of symbols and very little else. The checklists that result are the first of humanity's intellectual artifacts. They express, they explain, and so they ratify a power of the mind. And, of course, they are artifacts in the process of becoming algorithms. — David Berlinski

Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything. — Gottfried Leibniz

In the meantime, most noble Sir, you have assigned this question to the geometry of position, but I am ignorant as to what this new discipline involves, and as to which types of problem Leibniz and Wolff expected to see expressed in this way. — Leonhard Euler

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

For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

For I hold that it is only when we can prove everything we assert that we understand perfectly the thing under consideration. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

It is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby immposd a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God. — Charles Taylor

As far as we are capable of knowledge we sin in neglecting to acquire it ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz , one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner. — Denis Diderot

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half. — Gottfried Leibniz

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. — G.K. Chesterton

If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. — Gottfried Leibniz

Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it - which must have been a great spiritual struggle - and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult. — Neal Stephenson

Leibniz thought that if we had a sufficiently logical notation, dispute and confusion would cease, and men would sit together and resolve their disputes by calculation. — Simon Blackburn

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73 — Gilles Deleuze

This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The past is pregnant with the present. — Gottfried Leibniz

[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz]
The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything - every individual substance - carries on forever. — Peter Loptson

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

if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR: — Neal Stephenson

The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road. — Gottfried Leibniz

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

It is a good thing to proceed in order and to establish propositions. This is the way to gain ground and to progress with certainty. — Gottfried Leibniz

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge ... it would not be the source of necessary truths ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

There is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except the understanding itself, or the one who understands. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Let there be two possible things, A and B, one of which is such that it is necessary that it exists, and let us assume that there is more perfection in A than in B. Then, at least, we can explain why A should exist rather than B and can foresee which of them will exist; indeed, this can be demonstrated, that is, rendered certain from the nature of the thing. — Gottfried Leibniz

And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle
all in the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe
for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient. — Neal Stephenson

Leibniz dedicated his life to efforts to educate people to understand that true happiness is found by locating their identity in benefitting mankind and their posterity. — Robert Trout

Shut up about Leibniz for a moment, Rudy, because look here: You - Rudy - and I are on a train, as it were, sitting in the dining car, having a nice conversation, and that train is being pulled along at a terrific clip by certain locomotives named The Bertrand Russell and Riemann and Euler and others. And our friend Lawrence is running alongside the train, trying to keep up with us - it's not that we're smarter than he is, necessarily, but that he's a farmer who didn't get a ticket. And I, Rudy, am simply reaching out through the open window here, trying to pull him onto the fucking train with us so that the three of us can have a nice little chat about mathematics without having to listen to him panting and gasping for breath the whole way. — Neal Stephenson

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only. — Gottfried Leibniz

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever? — Gottfried Leibniz

It has long seemed ridiculous to me to suppose that the nature of things has been so poor and stingy that it provided souls only to such a trifling mass of bodies on our globe, like human bodies, when it could have given them to all, without interfering with its other ends. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

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

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

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

It's easier to be original and foolish than original and wise. — Gottfried Leibniz

... every feeling is the perception of a truth ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

"We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Leibniz. In what became known as "Hume's Fork" the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. — Benjamin Franklin

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

Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man's work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes. — Neal Stephenson

The minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz. — Andre Maurois

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

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. — Gottfried Leibniz

There is no argument so cogent not only in demonstrating, the indestructibility of the soul, but also in showing that it always preserves in its nature traces of all its preceding states with a practical remembrance which can always be aroused. Since it has the consciousness of or knows in itself what each one calls his me. This renders it open to moral qualities, to chastisement and to recompense even after this life, for immortality without remembrance would be of no value. — Gottfried Leibniz

The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology. — Gottfried Leibniz

The larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses. — Gottfried Leibniz

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

Music, Schopenhauer wrote, is not unconscious arithmetic, as Leibniz had claimed, but unconscious philosophy, since in music the inner essence of the world, which is will, is made directly present to the mind. — Roger Scruton

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