Henri Poincare Quotes

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover.

I try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over.

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.

The theoretician believes in logic and believes that he despises dreams, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him.... He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.

It is by logic we prove. It is by intuition we discover.

Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

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.

Sometimes the best ideas I have are in my bathtub or in my bed or in my dreams early in the morning before waking up ... I'm like a TV antennae, I catch it all and do it my way.

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton’s thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the ‘discovery’ of the laws of gravity.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

This is largely the methodology I've used throughout my career - that is, starting with a question as to what might be the properties of a set of compounds that could be invented which were unusual and unpredictable. Many times I've felt a bit like Columbus setting sail.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.