Henri Poincaré - Nature Quotes

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The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.

Henri Poincaré
Every phenomenon, however trifling it be, has a cause, and a mind infinitely powerful, and infinitely well-informed concerning the laws of nature could have foreseen it from the beginning of the ages. If a being with such a mind existed, we could play no game of chance with him; we should always lose.

Henri Poincaré
Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility.

Henri Poincaré
It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincaré, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

Henri Poincaré
Time and Space … It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.

Henri Poincaré
A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature. ...we work not only to obtain the positive results which, according to the profane, constitute our one and only affection, as to experience this aesthetic emotion and to convey it to others who are capable of experiencing it.

Henri Poincaré
If there were no solid bodies in nature, there would be no geometry.

Henri Poincaré
Today we no longer beg of nature; we command her, because we have discovered certain of her secrets and shall discover others each day. We command her in the name of laws she cannot challenge, because they are hers; these laws we do not madly ask her to change, we are the first to submit to them. Nature can only be governed by obeying her.

Henri Poincaré
The historian, the physicist, even, must make a choice among facts; the head of the scientist, which is only a corner of the universe, could never contain the universe entire; so that among the innumerable facts nature offers, some will be passed by, others retained.

Henri Poincaré
Isolated amidst a nature where everything was a mystery to him, terrified at each unexpected manifestation of incomprehensible forces, he [primitive man] was incapable of seeing in the conduct of the universe anything but caprice.

Henri Poincaré