Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The doctrine that the world is governed by perfection was introduced to exclude the arbitrary will of God.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions are determined only by the principle of memory.

The happiness of a fool would be unbearable.

Music is the hidden arithmetical exercise of a mind unconscious that it is calculating.

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Nihil est sine ratione. There is nothing without a reason.

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.

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

He who does not act does not exist.

This interconnection or accommodation of all created things to each other, and each to all the others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and consequently, that each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.

Nature has established patterns originating in the return of events, but only for the most part. New illnesses flood the human race, so that no matter how many experiments you have done on corpses, you have not thereby imposed a limit on the nature of events so that in the future they could not vary.

every feeling is the perception of a truth...

imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful resource of the divine intellect, almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

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

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

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.

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

The soul follows its own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws; and they agree with each other in virtue of the pre-established harmony.

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.

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.