Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The universe is a machine divinely constructed.

The monads are the substantial atoms of nature.

The true method of discovery is to reduce everything to numbers.

The universe is a harmony, and all discord is but harmony not understood.

The monads are centers of force, not points of matter.

The actual world is the most beautiful, because it contains the greatest variety with the greatest order.

I do not believe that a world without evil, preferable in order to ours, is possible; otherwise it would have been preferred. It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.

Certainly the condition of our affairs [in Europe], slipping as we are into ever greater corruption, seems to be such that we need missionaries from the Chinese who might teach us the use and practice of natural religion, just as we have sent them teachers of revealed theology.

It is not absurd for discerning Europeans . . . to see something today which is not adequately known by the Chinese erudites, and to be able to interpret their ancient books better than the erudites themselves.

A great doctor kills more people than a great general.

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

Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.

If geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate it but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes.

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

If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.

Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.

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.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

I maintain that the universe is a kind of clock, wound up by God, and that it runs without His further interference.

There are two labyrinths of the human mind: one concerns the composition of the continuum, and the other the nature of freedom, and both spring from the same source—the infinite.