27 quotes
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.
Théorie analytique des probabilités (1812)
Truth and justice are the immutable laws of social order.
"Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration."
Hesiod, the oldest author to have written on theogony, asserted that the gods and men are created by unknown natural forces. We can therefore consider paganism as a superstitious form of atheism.
Such is the advantage of a well-constructed language that its simplified notation often becomes the source of profound theories.
"Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all." (Sometimes freely translated as: "Read Euler: he is our master in everything.")
"What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense."
Analysis and natural philosophy owe their most important discoveries to this fruitful means, which is called induction. Newton was indebted to it for his theorem of the binomial and the principle of universal gravity.
The curve described by a single molecule of air or vapor is regulated in a manner just as certain as the planetary orbits; the only difference between them that which comes from our ignorance.
A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities from a École Normale Lecture (1795)
"Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but problems of chance."
"The last thing we expect of you, General, is a lesson in geometry!"
Sire, I had no need for that hypothesis.
The most important questions of life... are indeed for the most part only problems of probability.
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
"L'homme ne poursuit que des chimères."
I had no need of that hypothesis.
"It is therefore obvious that..."
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.
Imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear entirely before sound philosophy, which sees in them only the expression of our ignorance of the true causes.
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)
Nevertheless the ancient reputation of the Indians does not permit us to doubt that they have always cultivated astronomy, and the remarkable exactness of the mean motions which they assign to the Sun and the Moon necessarily required very ancient observation.
Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch... all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath.
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)