a few quotes and fragments from Leibniz

(as much for their poetic or humorous potential as anything else. Pagination refers to G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, Oxford 1998.) (sorry about the font size crap--Blogger has its oddities, which I could probably fix with some time in the HTML region... but won't.)

So in order that our words should be as blameless as their meaning, it will be as well to link certain ways of speech with certain thoughts. (69)

Willebrord Snell, first formulator of the rules of refraction (75)

as if there were only it and God in the world (112)

I am as corpuscularian as could be in the explanation of particular phenomena (114)

It would be unworthy of a philosopher to admit forms with no reason, but without them it is incomprehensible that bodies could be substances (117).

only beings by aggregation (117)

I think that a slab of marble is only like a heap of stones (117)

For imagine there were two stones, for example the diamond of the Grand Duke and that of the Great Mogul (117)

something like what I call myself… Now, the myself that I have just mentioned, or what corresponds to that in every individual substance (118)

if you ask me in particular what I say about the sun (118)

animated machines (118)

a soul or substantial form of the kind which we call myself (120)

If fire took hold of one of those houses where they keep a hundred thousand silkworms (121)

as he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways (66).

Sleep, which is an image of death, and ecstasies; the enshrouding of a silkworm in its shell, which can be taken for death; the resuscitation of drowned flies brought about by covering them with some dry powder (whereas they remain completely dead if they are left unaided), and that of swallows which make their winter quarters in reeds and which are discovered with no semblance of life; experiments with people killed by cold, drowned or strangled, and who are then brought back to life... all these things confirm my opinion that these different states differ only in degree... (133).

nothing is empty, sterile, undeveloped or without perception... (135)