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We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.

Henri Poincare

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Henri Poincare
Age: 58 †
Born: 1854
Born: April 29
Died: 1912
Died: July 17
Astronomer
Engineer
Mathematician
Philosopher
Philosopher Of Science
Physicist
Researcher
Topologist
University Teacher
Le Cateau
Jules Henri Poincaré
Poincaré
Henri Poincare
Jules Henri Poincare
Poincare
Also
Consoling
Cruel
Delusion
Wonder
Whether
Often
Truth

More quotes by Henri Poincare

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When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks.
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Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer.
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One geometry cannot be more true than another it can only be more convenient.
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The subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self. It knows how to choose and to divine.
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Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means.
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If we ought not to fear mortal truth, still less should we dread scientific truth. In the first place it can not conflict with ethics? But if science is feared, it is above all because it can give no happiness? Man, then, can not be happy through science but today he can much less be happy without it.
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In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind.
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All of mathematics is a tale about groups.
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What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that it is one that can be understood by the pupils.
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Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.
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Ideas rose in clouds I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
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How is it that there are so many minds that are incapable of understanding mathematics? ... the skeleton of our understanding, ... and actually they are the majority. ... We have here a problem that is not easy of solution, but yet must engage the attention of all who wish to devote themselves to education.
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The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
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One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.
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It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.
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Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects.
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Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.
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What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?
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Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
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It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed.
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