What we know here is very little, but what we are ignorant of is immense.

Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.

To Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God: Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

Do you believe in god? I have no need for that hypothesis, he may be around though.

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

However, the small probability of a similar encounter [of the earth with a comet], can become very great in adding up over a huge sequence of centuries. It is easy to picture to oneself the effects of this impact upon the Earth. The axis and the motion of rotation changed; the seas abandoning their old position to throw themselves toward the new equator; a large part of men and animals drowned in this universal deluge, or destroyed by the violent tremor imparted to the terrestrial globe.

The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.