Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis..

We are so far from knowing all the forces of nature and their various modes of action that it would be unworthy of the philosopher to deny phenomena ….

Man follows only phantoms..

Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple mo….

The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God..

The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another in no apparent….

The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a….

Such is the advantage of a well constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories..

Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe. Laplace: Sire, I had no need….

The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Infinitely varied in its effects, nature is simple only in its causes, and….

[It] may be laid down as a general rule that, if the result of a long series of precise observations approximates a simple relation so closely that t….

Said about Napier's logarithms: . . . by shortening the labors doubled the life of the astronomer..

However, the small probability of a similar encounter [of the earth with a comet], can become very great in adding up over a huge sequence of centuri….

[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest onl….

What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense..

It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the worl….

His last words, according to De Morgan: Man follows only phantoms..