Henri Poincare Quotes

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise.

When you come to think about it, nothing has any meaning, for when there was nobody to think, there was nobody to interpret what happened.

I know what I'm thinking bout, I think. Nothing. And as much of it as I can.

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

As long as I am thinking, I am alive.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

To recognize causes is to think, and through thought alone feelings become knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world. D. R. Hofstadter and D. C. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, 1981.

I can readily conceive of a man without hands or feet; and I could conceive of him without a head, if experience had not taught me that by this he thinks, Thought then, is the essence of man, and without this we cannot conceive of him.

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.

Do you always think this much? It's just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.

Thinking of nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Thinking of everything.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.

Words are not brains, you know.

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.

To every separate person a thing is what he thinks it is – in other words, not a thing, but a think.

Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum -- "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Every thought you think and every word you speak is affirming something.

The way we see things is the source of the way we think or the way we act