Henri Poincare Quotes

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

A thought is an idea in transit.

Life doesn't last; art doesn't last. It doesn't matter.

Lights get low and that's when I have my brightest ideas.

Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the process by which human ends are ultimately answered.

Man can no more think without words than see without light.

Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.

Ideas are things that happen at any time because you're constantly thinking and evaluating life as if it were an eternally unsolvable math problem, which it is.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

It's sort of a mystery where ideas come from.

The consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought.

The truth is that reason is the enemy of life.

There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.

We are an episode between two oblivions.

Vivere est cogitare. (To think is to live)

Sometimes I think, sometimes I am .

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

An idea is a light turned on in a man's soul. Comic-strip artists are in the habit of representing it by means of a light bulb flashing on, above the head of a character who has suddenly grasped an idea. In simple, primitive terms, this is an appropriate symbol.

But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?

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.

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.

External motion we call action; internal motion is human thought.