Top 90 Gottfried Leibniz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We live in the best of all possible worlds.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

Featured in: Philosophy Quotes

2. “What is is what must be.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

3. “Take what you need, do what you should, you will get what you want.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

4. “Everything that is possible demands to exist.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

5. “Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?”

— Gottfried Leibniz

6. “TO LOVE is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

7. “Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

8. “The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

10. “Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

11. “The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe. The Monadology.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

12. “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

14. “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.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

16. “The present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past, the distant is expressed in the near.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

17. “Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can’t see anything.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

18. “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.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

19. “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation which could be relegated to anyone else if machines were used.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

20. “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

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

22. “The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

24. “Music is a secret and unconscious mathematical problem of the soul.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

25. “A great doctor kills more people than a great general.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

26. “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

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

28. “The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypothesis, is like the art of decyphering, in which an ingenious conjecture greatly shortens the road.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

29. “Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

30. “He who hasn’t tasted bitter things hasn’t earned sweet things.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

31. “Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

32. “It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind’s labour.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

33. “Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

34. “The larger the mass of collected things, the less will be their usefulness. Therefore, one should not only strive to assemble new goods from everywhere, but one must endeavor to put in the right order those that one already possesses.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

35. “Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz

38. “All things in God are spontaneous.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

39. “Nature does not make leaps.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

40. “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

41. “Of what use would it be to you, sir, to become King of China on condition that you forgot what you have been? Would it not be the same as if God, at the same time he destroyed you, created a King in China?”

— Gottfried Leibniz

42. “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.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

43. “Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

44. “In my judgment an organic machine new to nature never arises, since it always contains an infinity of organs so that it can express, in its own way, the whole universe; indeed, it always contains all past and present times.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

45. “God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

46. “Every mind has a horizon in respect to its present intellectual capacity but not in respect to its future intellectual capacity.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

47. “We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

48. “And there must be simple substances, because there are compounds; for the compound is nothing but a collection or aggregatum of simples.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

49. “There is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.”

— Gottfried Leibniz

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

— Gottfried Leibniz