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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.

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
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Stills
Conflict
Much
Truth
Ought
Men
Give
Happiness
Feared
Still
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Mortal
Today
Less
Dread
Firsts
Fear
Mortals
Without
Science
Scientific
First
Place
Ethics

More quotes by Henri Poincare

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Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.
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Analyse data just so far as to obtain simplicity and no further.
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Mathematicians do not deal in objects, but in relations between objects thus, they are free to replace some objects by others so long as the relations remain unchanged. Content to them is irrelevant: they are interested in form only.
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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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If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
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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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The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.
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...the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and of forms, of geometric elegance. It is a genuinely aesthetic feeling, which all mathematicians know
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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.
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Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.
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Pure logic could never lead us to anything but tautologies it can create nothing new not from it alone can any science issue.
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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
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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.
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Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new it alone can give us certainty.
Henri Poincare
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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
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But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.
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It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.
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A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.
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Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.
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Mathematicians do not study objects, but the relations between objects.
Henri Poincare