Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes

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

[...] c’est que jamais rien n’arrive, sans qu’il y ail une cause ou du moins une raison déterminante, c’est-à-dire quelque chose qui puisse servir à rendre a priori, pourquoi cela est existant plulôt que de toute autre façon. Ce grand principe a lieu dans tous les événements, et on ne donnera jamais un exemple contraire : et quoique le plus souvent ces raisons déterminantes ne nous soient pas assez connues, nous ne laissons pas d’entrevoir qu’il y en a.
Essais de Théodicée, 1.44

[...] 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.

The present state of a single substance is the natural result of its precedent state, so much so that the present is pregnant with the future.

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…

Thus it may be said that not only the soul, the mirror of an indestructible universe, is indestructible, but also the animal itself, though its mechanism may often perish in part and take off or put on an organic slough.

imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful resource of the divine intellect, almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…

La tranquillité est un degré pour avancer vers la stupidité. . . Il faut toujours trouver quelque chose à faire, penser, projeter, s'intéresser, pour le public et pour le particulier, mais cela d'une manière qui nous réjouisse, si nos souhaits sont accomplis et ne nous chagrine point en cas qu'ils manquent.

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.

...as far as we are capable of knowledge we sin in neglecting to acquire it...

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.

He who does not act does not exist.

Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.

Nam filum labyrintho de compositione continui deque maximo et minimo ac indesignabili at que infinito non nisi geometria praebere potest, ad metaphysicam vero solidam nemo veniet, nisi qui illac transiverit.