Pierre-Simon Laplace Quotes

All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.

Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.

The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

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.

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.

To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.

Truth and justice are the immutable laws of social order.

What we know is not much. What we don't know is enormous.

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Do you believe in god? I have no need for that hypothesis, he may be around though.

The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.

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

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 its economy consists in producing a great number of phenomena, often very complicated, by means of a small number of general laws.

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 of that hypothesis. Later when told by Napoleon about the incident, Lagrange commented: Ah, but that is a fine hypothesis. It explains so many things.

Read Euler, read Euler. He is the master of us all.

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.

The telescope sweeps the sky without finding God.

I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe--that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.

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 sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

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

Man follows only phantoms.

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.