Pierre-Simon Laplace Quotes

Comment, vous faites tout le système du monde, vous donnez les lois de toute la création et dans tout votre livre vous ne parlez pas une seule fois de l'existence de Dieu !

[Sire,] je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.

On demandait à Laplace quel était selon lui le plus grand mathématicien de l'Allemagne. C'est Pfaff, répondit-il. - Je croyais, reprit l'interlocuteur, que Gauss lui était supérieur. - Mais, s'écria Laplace, vous me demandez quel est le plus grand mathématicien de l'Allemagne, et Gauss est le plus grand mathématicien de l'Europe.

[Sire,] je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse.

Said the great and magnanimous Laplace: 'It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.'

Translation: "Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all." (Sometimes freely translated as: "Read Euler: he is our master in everything.")

Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch... all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath.

"Les questions les plus importantes de la vie ne sont en effet, pour la plupart, que des problèmes de probabilité." Théorie analytique des probabilités, 1812.

Translation: "One sees, from this Essay, that the theory of probabilities is basically just common sense reduced to calculus; it makes one appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it."

Lagrange, also present (or to whom Napoleon repeated Laplace's reply, in another version), then commented: "Ah ! C’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses."

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit.But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

The theory of chance consists in reducing all the events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible, that is to say, to such as we may be equally undecided about in regard to their existence, and in determining the number of cases favorable to the event whose probability is sought.

Imaginary causes have gradually receded with the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear entirely before sound philosophy, which sees in them only the expression of our ignorance of the true causes.

Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose, ce que nous ignorons est immense.

Translation: "Life's most important questions are, for the most part, nothing but problems of chance."