Pierre-Simon Laplace

"I had no need of that hypothesis."

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

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

"If we ought to have a fear of anything, we ought to have a fear of want of knowledge rather than of scepticism."

"The most important philosophical problems are those posed by science."

"Probability is relative, in part to this knowledge, in part to our ignorance."

"All the effects we see in nature are only mathematical results of a small number of immutable laws."

"The present state of the system of the universe is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment."

"We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the state that is to follow."

"Destiny rules over all our actions and renders all our efforts and projects always vain."

"This beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent being."

"The ignorance in which we are left respecting the mode of action of the soul upon the body, is the source of the errors and disputes of philosophers."

"Man follows only his immediate self-interest."

"The laws of probability are only common sense reduced to calculation."

"A great mind becomes great through talking."

"Political economy is the science of determining the character and circumstances of a given people."

"The true theory of the universe is at once a work of reason and of imagination."

"Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration."

"Clever men are good, but they are not the best."

"Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe."

"The chief defect of hot-headed people is that they never allow themselves to cool down."

"A government should be fortified by making it respectable to be honest and disreputable to be otherwise."

"The study of nature is our proper occupation."

"It is impossible that the perfection of medicine should not come from its harmony with mathematics."

"To understand life and nature, one needs to understand the mathematics of nature."

"It is important not to restrict the visions of our imaginations."

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

"The future is hidden even from the cleverest men."

"An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God."

"One should not despise the ideas of one's adversaries."