Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays Quotes

“I don't really eliminate body, but reduce it to what it is. For I show that corporeal mass, which is thought to have something over and above simple substances, is not a substance, but a phenomenon resulting from simple substances, which alone have unity and absolute reality.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“The present state of a single substance is the natural result of its precedent state, so much so that the present is pregnant with the future.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“To the possible objection that thus the world would of necessity have long ago turned into a paradise, it is easy to reply: Many substances already may have attained great perfection; yet, the continuum being infinitely divisible, there will always remain in the unfathomable depth of the universe some somnolent elements which are still to be awakened, developed, and improved - in a word, promoted to higher culture. This is why the end of progress can never be attained.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“Now, since in the divine ideas there is an infinity of possible universes of which only one can exist, the choice made by God must have a sufficient reason which determines him to the one rather than to another. This reason can be found only in fitness, that is, in the degree of perfection contained in these worlds. For each possible has a right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves. Thus nothing is entirely arbitrary.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“This connection of all created things with every single one of them and their adaptation to every single one, as well as the connection and adaptation of every single thing to all others, has the result that every single substance stands in relations which express all the others. Whence every single substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“Take the case (to use an easy example) of a river, carrying boats and communicating to them its own velocity, yet limited by their own inertia so that, all the rest being equal, the more heavily loaded will be carried more slowly. Hence it can be stated that the speed of the boats comes from the river, the slowness, from the load; the positive, from the force of the propelling agent, the privative, from the inertia of the propelled. Quite in the same manner it may be said that God contributes to the creatures their perfections, yet is limited by their receptivity. Thus all goods are due to the divine force; the evils, to the torpor of the creature.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays

“But in the treasures of divine wisdom, that is, in the hidden God and (which comes to the same) in the universal harmony of the world, a profundity (bathos) is latent, which contains the reasons why the actual series of the universe, comprehending the events we admire and the judgements we worship, has been chosen by God as the best and as preferable to all others.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays