The judgment may be compared to a clock or watch, where the most ordinary machine is sufficient to tell the hours; but the most elaborate alone can point out the minutes and seconds, and distinguish the smallest differences of time.

A work of morality, politics, criticism will be more elegant, other things being equal, if it is shaped by the hand of geometry.

I have lived one hundred years; and I die with the consolation of never having thrown the slightest ridicule upon the smallest virtue.

To despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.

Mathematicians are like lovers. Grant a mathematician the least principle, and he will draw from it a consequence which you must also grant him, and from this consequence another.

Our sun enlightens the planets that belong to him; why may not every fixed star also have planets to which they give light?

I shall leave the world without regret, for it hardly contains a single good listener.