Johann Heinrich Lambert

"This is all to which weak and limited beings can pretend, beings who occupy a point, and last but a moment in this mighty edifice built for eternity."

"In order to supply the defects of experience, we will have recourse to the probable conjectures of analogy, conclusions which we will bequeath to our posterity to be ascertained by new observations, w…"

"We will found our hypothesis in the general laws of motion, whose effects are every where the same, and whose influence extends to the utmost limits of matter."

"We will next proceed by the lamp of experience, consulting with care the observations deposited in the records of astronomy."

"If in two ellipses having a common major axis we take two such arcs that their chords are equal, and that also the sums of the radii vectores, drawn respectively from the foci to the extremities of th…"