Quotes About Leibniz

Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God.

It appears that the solution of the problem of time and space is reserved to philosophers who, like Leibniz, are mathematicians, or to mathematicians who, like Einstein, are philosophers.

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.

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.

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.

The opposition of reason and religion that runs through the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which identified religion with the Catholic Church, would have been incomprehensible to Leibniz, and a like opposition never gained a footing in German culture even after him. On the contrary, the acutest critic of Christianity, Nietzsche, shows his German roots by the fact that he simultaneously wages war on reason - which would again have been incomprehensible to Voltaire.

A philosopher who was not sufficiently modern for her, Leibniz, has said that the journey from the intellect to the heart is a long one.

proof of Leibniz's theory of Pre-established Harmony: that neither atoms nor human beings really affect each other; they just look as if they do.

Though Leibniz may have had special reasons for considering base two, neither this base nor any other had until recently been seriously considered as a substitute for base ten. In fact, aside from incidental uses of other bases in higher mathematics to facilitate an occasional proof, the subject of bases other than ten was regarded until recently as an intellectual amusement.