Date: 1708, 1737, 1742

"Je ne suis nullement pour la tabula rasa de Aristote, & il y a quelque chose de solide dans ce que Platon appelloit le reminiscence."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1714

If we imagine a "machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions" enlarged to the size of a mill, upon "inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1714

"There is an infinity of past and present shapes and motions that enter into the efficient cause of my present writing"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1714

Souls, "in general, are living mirrors or images of the universe of creatures."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1714

Each "mind [is] like a little divinity in its own realm."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1714

"But when a monad has organs that are adjusted in such a way that, through them, there is contrast and distinction among the impressions they receive, and consequently contrast and distinction in the perceptions that represent them [in the monads] (as, for example, when the rays of light are conc...

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1716

"To say that souls are intelligent points is to use an expression that is insufficiently exact. When I call them centers of concentrations of external things, I am speaking analogically."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"Une pierre de marbre qui a des veines plutôt que d'une pierre de marbre tout unie ou de tablettes vides, c'est-à-dire de ce qui s'appelle tabula rasa chez les philosophes."

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

One might say "that there are truths engraved in the soul which it has never known, and even ones which it will never know"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)

Date: 1765

"If all [the mind] had was the mere capacity to receive those items of knowledge--a passive power to do so, as indeterminate as the power of wax to receive shapes or of a blank page to receive words--it would not be the source of necessary truths"

— Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646-1716)