Gottfried Leibniz Quotes

It’s easier to be original and foolish than original and wise.

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

The greatness of a life can only be estimated by the multitude of its actions. We should not count the years, it is our actions which constitute our life.

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

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.

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.

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

For, above all, I hold a notion of possibility and necessity according to which there are some things that are possible, but yet not necessary, and which do not really exist. From this it follows that a reason that always forces a free mind to choose one thing over another (whether that reason derives from the perfection of a thing, as it does in God, or from our imperfection) does not eliminate our freedom.

The present is great with the future.

Now this connection or adaption of all created things with each, and of each with all the rest, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that consequently it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.

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

The words ‘Here you can find perfect peace’ can be written only over the gates of a cemetery.