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

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.

Man follows only phantoms.

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

We are so far from knowing all the forces of nature and their various modes of action that it would be unworthy of the philosopher to deny phenomena simply because they are inexplicable at the present state of our knowledge. The more difficult it is to acknowledge their existence, the greater the care with which we must study these phenomena.

Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis.

I have lived long enough to know what I did not at one time believe--that no society can be upheld in happiness and honor without the sentiment of religion.