Top 15 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quotes

This is the best of all possible worlds.

He who hasn't tasted bitter things hasn't earned sweet things.

Nihil est sine ratione.
[There is nothing without a reason.]

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

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

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

The present is big with the future.

It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could safely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.

(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)

…every feeling is the perception of a truth...

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

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

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

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.

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.