Henri Poincare Quotes

One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.

It's always a mystery to me, I have to confess. I've never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there's nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there.

You gleefully say, "I just thought of something!", when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck. When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, your neural circuitry has been working on it for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden machinery behind the scenes.

I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen.

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously, and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.

One hears but one does not seek; one takes -- one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, it comes of necessity and unfalteringly formed.

First thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.

I always work better when I do not reason, when no question of right or wrong enter in,-when my pulse quickens to the form before me without hesitation nor calculation.

Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!

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.

Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope.

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

I don't understand what I do, I just know that it's great.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.