28 Quotes by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

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

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.(Describing, in 1685, the value to astronomers of the hand-cranked calculating machine he had invented in 1673.)

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

... for although people can be made worse off by all other gifts, correct reasoning alone can only be for the good.

When the origin of remote peoples goes beyond history, our languages show themselves their oldest monuments

For all bodies are in perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are passing in and out of them continually.

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

…every feeling is the perception of a truth...

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.