Pierre-Simon Laplace

The universe is a vast machine, and all its parts are subject to the same laws.

The human mind has a natural tendency to believe in the existence of causes for all phenomena.

The most important truths are those which are most simple.

The theory of probabilities is essentially only a calculus of common sense.

The regularity of the celestial motions is a proof of the wisdom of the Creator.

The probability of an event is the ratio of the number of cases favorable to it to the number of all possible cases, when all these cases are equally possible.

The more we know, the more we are aware of our ignorance.

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Given a sufficiently large number of observations, the most extraordinary coincidences are bound to occur.

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

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

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.

The more profound the truth, the simpler the expression.

It is an important question in the theory of probabilities to determine the probability that a given event, which has already occurred a certain number of times, will occur again.

The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by the simplicity of our conceptions.

The probability of a future event is the ratio of the number of cases favorable to that event to the total number of possible cases, when all these cases are equally possible.

We owe to Newton the greatest discoveries that have ever been made in the mathematical sciences.

The influence of the moon on the tides is one of the most striking proofs of universal gravitation.

The universe is a vast machine, and all its parts are in motion according to immutable laws.

The method of least squares is one of the most important applications of the theory of probabilities.