New Essays on Human Understanding Quotes

“…every feeling is the perception of a truth...”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“...as far as we are capable of knowledge we sin in neglecting to acquire it...”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“Perceptions which are at present insensible may grow some day: nothing is useless, and eternity provides great scope for change.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“…if geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate I but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes…”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge…it would not be the source of necessary truths…”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding

“For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do not at all think of them.”
― Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding