This is another classic quotation in the history of statistics, attributed to Florence Nightingale:
To understand God's thoughts we must study statistics, for these are the measure of his purpose.
It is a great quote, and many people use it, but I have been unable to find an actual source for this quotation. Among many other places, it appears in https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale, one of the few that provides any attribution:
As quoted in Chance Rules : An Informal Guide to Probability, Risk, and Statistics (1999) by Brian Everitt, p. 137
But that does not contain an actual source of a writing by FN. In searching for this, I came across The Collected Works of Florence Nightingale, http://www.uoguelph.ca/~cwfn/index.htm, but am unable to find this quote there. Can anybody help?