The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.
Interpretation
Life's significant questions often reduce to issues of chance and probability.
Pierre-Simon Laplace highlights that many of the profound questions we face in life are not just philosophical musings but are intricately tied to understanding probabilities and uncertainties. This perspective encourages us to analyze our dilemmas through a lens of chance, emphasizing that much of our decision-making and life experience is shaped by what is likely rather than certain.
In practice
In a discussion on fate vs. free will, this quote can be used to illustrate how chance plays a role in our lives.
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 molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
It is interesting thus to follow the intellectual truths of analysis in the phenomena of nature. This correspondence, of which the system of the world will offer us numerous examples, makes one of the greatest charms attached to mathematical speculations.
All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.
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 order. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge.
Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
Some day I'm going to have to stand before God, and if He asks me why I didn't let that [Jackie] Robinson fellow play ball, I don't think saying 'because of the color of his skin' would be a good enough answer.
Indeed, the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.
When the female voice is repressed and stifled, the entire community can easily find themselves cut off from the sacred feminine, depriving themselves of the full image of god.
We all have people who are literally one life shock away from going into a crisis. For many of us, we have a buffer in one way or another. We have a savings account, or we have credit that we can go to. The underserved don't have that luxury.
I love him who wants to create over and beyond himself and thus perishes.
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