Henri Poincare Quotes

My life experience has taught me nothing happens by chance. Even the idea of the ball in a roulette game: it's not chance it ends up in a certain place. It's forces that are at play.

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.

The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

Is it possible that there are no coincidences?

Why does anything ever happen? Some things happen and some don't.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

If we knew enough, fortune would turn out to be nature.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

The only thing I hate worse than prophecy is self-fulfilling prophecy

Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

Nothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or with things, comes by chance or accident or is really at the mercy of external causes.

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Fate is unpenetrated causes.

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

God is not blind; neither is He capricious. For Him there are no accidents. With God there are no cases of chance events.

Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.

Nothing ever happens by chance; everything is pushed from behind.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

We are driven by the results of the Big Bang, billions of years ago, which eventually produced life, which eventually produced human beings, and so on. But me? I'm an accident - a result - and therefore a victim.