Quotes from leibniz gottfried wilhelm ii

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.

There is a certain destiny of everything, regulated by the foreknowledge and providence of God in His works.

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

The soul follows its own laws, and the body its own likewise, and they accord by virtue of the harmony pre-established among all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.

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.

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.

I don't say that bodies like flint, which are commonly called inanimate, have perceptions and appetition; rather they have something of that sort in them, as worms are in cheese.

It is God who is the ultimate reason of things, and the Knowledge of God is no less the beginning of science than his essence and will are the beginning of things.

God's relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.

To love is to find pleasure in the perfection of another.

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.

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

Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.

I also readily admit that there are animals, taken in the ordinary sense, that are incomparably larger than those we know of, and I have sometimes said in jest that there might be a system like ours which is the pocketwatch of some enormous giant.

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

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.

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.

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.