Gottfried Leibniz quotes

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath and philosopher, widely regarded as one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. His contributions laid the foundations for calculus, computer science, and formal logic. He became known for his optimism, co-inventing calculus and advocating that we live in the “best of all possible worlds.” Here are 45 of his quotes:

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

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

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

Gottfried Leibniz

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Gottfried Leibniz

Nature does not make leaps.

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

Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves.

Gottfried Leibniz

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.

Gottfried Leibniz

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

Gottfried Leibniz

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

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

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

Everything that is possible demands to exist.

Gottfried Leibniz

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

Gottfried Leibniz

There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in.

Gottfried Leibniz

And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future.

Gottfried Leibniz

We live in the best of all possible worlds.

Gottfried Leibniz

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-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

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

When Sir A. Fountaine was at Berlin with Leibnitz in 1701, and at supper with the Queen of Prussia, she asked Leibnitz his opinion of Sir Isaac Newton. Leibnitz said that taking mathematicians from the beginning of the world to the time when Sir Isaac lived, what he had done was much the better half; and added that he had consulted all the learned in Europe upon some difficult points without having any satisfaction, and that when he applied to Sir Isaac, he wrote him in answer by the first post, to do so and so, and then he would find it.

Gottfried Leibniz

This miracle of analysis, this marvel of the world of ideas, an almost amphibian object between Being and Non-being that we call the imaginary number.

Gottfried Leibniz