Quotes from Gottfried Leibniz

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

The most perfect society is that whose purpose is the universal and supreme happiness.

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.

Indeed every monad must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings, which are precisely alike, and in which it is not possible to find some difference which is internal, or based on some intrinsic quality.

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

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.

He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.

To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.

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.

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.

To love is to place happiness in the heart of another.

For since it is impossible for a created monad to have a physical influence on the inner nature of another, this is the only way in which one can be dependent on another.

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact.

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.

Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.

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.

It follows from what we have just said, that the natural changes of monads come from an internal principle, since an external cause would be unable to influence their inner being.

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.

Thus God alone is the primary Unity, or original simple substance, from which all monads, created and derived, are produced.

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.

..This is why 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.

Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.

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.