Nature does not make leaps.

We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.

The art of discovering the causes of phenomena, or true hypotheses, is like the art of deciphering, in which an ingenious conjecture often greatly shortens the road.

I have said more than once, that I hold space to be something purely relative, as time; an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions.

Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.