Quote

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

Henri Poincare

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Stones
Built
Science
Heap
House
Accumulation
Facts
Collection
Collections
Plus
Accounts

More quotes by Henri Poincare

Image
When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole it is to intuition that we must look for it.
Henri Poincare
Image
The mind uses its faculty for creativity only when experience forces it to do so.
Henri Poincare
Image
Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.
Henri Poincare
Image
Point set topology is a disease from which the human race will soon recover.
Henri Poincare
Image
For a long time the objects that mathematicians dealt with were mostly ill-defined one believed one knew them, but one represented them with the senses and imagination but one had but a rough picture and not a precise idea on which reasoning could take hold.
Henri Poincare
Image
Les faits ne parlent pas. Facts do not speak.
Henri Poincare
Image
Mathematicians are born, not made.
Henri Poincare
Image
All of mathematics is a tale about groups.
Henri Poincare
Image
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.
Henri Poincare
Image
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.
Henri Poincare
Image
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.
Henri Poincare
Image
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.
Henri Poincare
Image
Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered.
Henri Poincare
Image
What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?
Henri Poincare
Image
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.
Henri Poincare
Image
Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
Henri Poincare
Image
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.
Henri Poincare
Image
Just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.
Henri Poincare
Image
Ideas rose in clouds I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
Henri Poincare
Image
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincare