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Leibniz Quotes

Browse 20 quotes about Leibniz.

Leibniz Quotes

“Feynman said, “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied” Our sentence would be: “The Monadology asserts that the fundamental units of existence are INFINITE, dimensionless, living, thinking points – monads, ZEROS, souls – each of which has INFINITE energy content, all controlled by a single equation – Euler’s Formula – and the collective energy of this universe of mathematical points creates a physical universe of which every objective value is ZERO, but, through a self-solving, self-optimizing, dialectical, evolving process, the universe generates a final, subjective value of INFINITY – divinity, perfection, the ABSOLUTE.” For ours is the religion of zero and infinity, the two numbers that define the soul and the whole of existence. As above, so below.”

SoulPhilosophyScienceReligionZeroInfinityOntological MathematicsLeibnizFeynmanEuler S Equation
Book:The God Equation
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“Even if you magnified a human brain to the size of a house and walked through it and inspected every part of it and all of the different ways in which it functions, you would never empirically encounter mind, thought, the unconscious, consciousness, subjectivity, free will. Empiricism doesn’t prove shit. It’s total anti-knowledge. It relies on induction and inference, but, as Hume showed, induction doesn’t prove anything (a black swan can pop up at any time), and inference has no place in empiricism: if you can’t perceive it, you have no right, in empiricism, to refer to it”

MindMatterScienceConsciousnessMaterialismIdealismEmpiricismHumeLeibniz
Author:David Sinclair
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“Science should have been about reason, but, instead, it chose to be a crude reaction and retort to religion, and that drove it down a catastrophic atheistic path. Had it not been for religion, science would have become what Leibniz always thought it should be: a union of the empirical and rational, of the physical and metaphysical, with the rational and metaphysical being the dominant partners.”

ReasonPhilosophyScienceReligionAtheismMetaphysicsRationalismLeibniz
Book:Richard Dawkins: The Pope of Unreason
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“[On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz] The answer is unknowable, but it may not be unreasonable to see him, at least in theological terms, as essentially a deist. He is a determinist: there are no miracles (the events so called being merely instances of infrequently occurring natural laws); Christ has no real role in the system; we live forever, and hence we carry on after our deaths, but then everything — every individual substance — carries on forever.”

ReasonScientistDeismNatural LawsLeibnizLeibniz Religious BeliefsDeterministNo Miracles
Author:Peter Loptson
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident. {Franklin's edit to the assertion in Thomas Jefferson's original wording, 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable' in a draft of the Declaration of Independence changes it instead into an assertion of rationality. The scientific mind of Franklin drew on the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of David Hume and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In what became known as 'Hume's Fork' the latters' theory distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact, and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition.}”

ReasonScienceRightsRationalityNewtonDeclaration Of IndependenceDeterminismTruthsEmpiricismHumeThomas JeffersonIsaac NewtonLeibnizDavid HumeJeffersonGottfried LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm LeibnizAnalytic
Author:Benjamin Franklin
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“Leibniz’s brilliant monadic system naturally gives rise to calculus (the main tool of mathematics and science). But it was not Leibniz who linked the energy of monads to waves – that was done later following the work of the French genius Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier on Fourier series and Fourier transforms. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s idea of energy originating from countless mathematical points and flowing across a plenum is indeed the first glimpse in the modern age of “field theory” that now underpins contemporary physics. Leibniz was centuries ahead of his time. Leibniz’s system is entirely mathematical. It brings mathematics to life. The infinite collection of monads constitutes an evolving cosmic organism, unfolding according to mathematical laws.”

ScienceGeniusMathematicsPhysicsPolymathLeibnizMonad
Book:The Last Man Who Knew Everything
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“Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?”

LightInspirationScienceFictionProgressBooksBibleIndiaTragedyMathematicsIntelligenceChinaMathExperimentsWriterChemistryRomePoetsEgyptGreeceNewtonPioneersShakespeareFranklinSongsLibrariesWilliam ShakespeareDiscoveriesThe BibleEuclidGoetheInventionsOpticsCopernicusDescartesKeplerIsaac NewtonLaws Of MotionGalileoLeibnizBurnsJames WattSchillerTheory Of GravityAeschylusJohannes KeplerNicolaus CopernicusPentateuchBenjamin FranklinGalileo GalileiRobert BurnsWattMorseGottfried LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm LeibnizJohann Wolfgang Von GoetheRené DescartesCavalieriPneumaticsAlessandro VoltaBerangerBonaventura CavalieriBonaventura Francesco CavalieriFultonGalvaniGottfried Von LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm Von LeibnizHydrostaticsJohann Von GoetheLuigi Aloisio GalvaniLuigi GalvaniPierre Jean De BérangerRichard TrevithickRobert FultonSamuel Finley Breese MorseSamuel MorseTheory Of Universal GravitationTrevethickVoltaÆSchylus
Book:Some Mistakes of Moses
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“Leibniz’s assertion that we live in the best of all possible worlds is, no matter what present appearances suggest, absolutely true – because the issue has to be considered over an entire cosmic Age, not just one snapshot in time. All the horrors of today are necessary for the glories of tomorrow. They provide the dialectical obstacles we must overcome, and we do so by becoming more and more perfect ourselves.”

StruggleAdversityChallengeLeibnizDialecticBest Of All Possible Worlds
Book:The Last Man Who Knew Everything
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“Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.”

ViewsProgressEnlightenmentScientistReasoningOptimistPantheismDeismLiberalScientific ProgressSpinozaLeibnizBaruch SpinozaGottfried LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Book:Marketing Theory: Foundations, Controversy, Strategy, and Resource-Advantage Theory
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“Gödel, the great mathematical logician, was the champion of rational religion. In many ways, we seek to establish a Leibniz-Gödel hyperrationalist alternative to science. We want to refute the idea that science is just one monolith of materialism and empiricism. You can be a much better scientist by choosing a much better, more rational science, namely that of idealism and rationalism.”

PhilosophyScienceReligionMaterialismIdealismNihilismOntological MathematicsLeibnizGodelRational Religion
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz's most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible, then they are identical, i.e. they are really one and the same object. What does it mean to call two objects indiscernible? It means that no difference at all can be found between them--they have exactly the same attributes. So if PII is true, then any two genuinely distinct objects must differ in at least one of their attributes--otherwise they would be one, not two. PII is intuitively quite compelling. It certainly is not easy to find an example of two distinct objects that share all their attributes. Even two mass-produced factory goods will normally differ in innumerable ways, even if the differences cannot be detected with the naked eye. Leibniz asks us to imagine two different universes, both containing exactly the same objects. In Universe One, each object occupies a particular location in absolute space.In Universe Two, each object has been shifted to a different location in absolute space, two miles to the east (for example). There would be no way of telling these two universes apart. For we cannot observe the position of an object in absolute space, as Newton himself admitted. All we can observe are the positions of objects relative to each other, and these would remain unchanged--for all objects are shifted by the same amount. No observations or experiments could ever reveal whether we lived in universe One or Two.”

LovePhilosophyScienceSpacePhysicsNewtonAstrophysicsLeibnizThought ExperimentsPiiPrinciple Of Indiscernibles
Book:Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction
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“Leibniz’s system is compatible with infinite divisibility, culminating – at infinity – with the indivisible monadic singularity. Materialism has no compatibility with singularities. The laws of physics are explicitly said to break down at singularities. That’s because singularities are mental frequency domains and science religiously believes only in spacetime and matter. Singularities are beyond science’s Meta Paradigm and ideology.”

PhilosophyScienceMaterialismLeibnizSingularities
Book:The Forbidden History of Science
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“The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the ancient theory of evolution.”

ScienceTimeSpaceHistoryEvolutionCarefulObservationReasoningAbyssNaturalismCausationLeibnizBuffonHuttonJames HuttonGeologistsGottfried LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm LeibnizComte De BuffonGeorges Louis LeclercGottfried W Leibniz
Book:Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The
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“Now walking out onto the upper deck to find Minerva sailing steadily eastward on calm seas, Daniel is appalled that anyone ever doubted these matters. The horizon is a perfect line. The sun a red circle tracing a neat path through the sky and proceeding through an orderly series of color changes: red, yellow, white. Thus nature. Minerva, the human world, is a family of curves. There are no straight lines here. The decks are slightly arched, to shed water and supply greater strength. The masts flexed, impelled by the thrust of the sails, but restrained by webs of rigging, curved grids like Isaac’s sundial lines. Of course, wherever wind collects in a sail or water skims around the hull, it follows rules that Bernoulli has set down using the calculus, Leibniz’s version. Minerva is a congregation of Leibniz curves, navigating according to Bernoulli rules, across a vast mostly water-covered sphere whose size, precise shape, trajectory through the heavens and destiny were all laid down by Newton.”

ScienceIsaac NewtonLeibnizBernoulli
Author:Neal Stephenson
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“The temporal, contingent world is, as Leibniz said, a “collection of finite things.” It is possible only because it is underpinned by an eternal, necessary world, comprising a collection of zero-infinity things, i.e. monads.”

PhilosophyEternalZeroInfinityIdealismRationalismMindsTemporalLeibnizMonadology
Book:God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics
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“Leibniz rejected the idea that fundamental reality was made up of material atoms; he posited instead that mind, particularly the Divine Mind, was the ground of reality manifest in all the infinite monads. In this theory, Leibniz actually presages many twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, including the theories of Wolfgang Pauli and psychiatrist Carl Jung regarding the continuity of the inner concepts of the psyche and the outer archetypes encountered in the world of physics. For Jung, psyche—or mind—bridged that gap, and Leibniz would agree, arguing that reality is, at base, conscious. I also see similarity between Maximus the Confessor and his logoi. For all these thinkers, reality was grounded in the mind of God, though they differ quite a bit in what that entails and how that is.”

PhilosophyTheologyLogosLeibnizMonadology
Book:Meta-Narratives: Essays on Philosophy and Symbolism
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“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

HumorReligionLeibnizWatchmaker
Book:Orthodoxy
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