The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.

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

I see with much pleasure that you are working on a large work on the integral Calculus ... The reconciliation of the methods which you are planning to make, serves to clarify them mutually, and what they have in common contains very often their true metaphysics; this is why that metaphysics is almost the last thing that one discovers. The spirit arrives at the results as if by instinct; it is only on reflecting upon the route that it and others have followed that it succeeds in generalising the methods and in discovering its metaphysics.

All the effects of Nature are only the mathematical consequences of a small number of immutable laws.

Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.

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.

I have no need for that hypothesis.