Monadology Quotes

“...it is the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths that distinguishes us from the mere animals and gives us Reason and the sciences, raising us to the knowledge of ourselves and of God...”
― Gottfried Leibniz

“And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, G. W. Leibniz's Monadology: An Edition for Students

“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

“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

“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.”
― Thomas Stark, God Is Mathematics: The Proofs of the Eternal Existence of Mathematics

“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.”
― Jay Dyer, Meta-Narratives: Essays on Philosophy and Symbolism