A Quote by Henri Poincare

The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things.

Henri Poincare

Quote Topics

Aim Between Imagine Relation Science Simplicity Themselves Things

Quote Author

Henri Poincare
French - Mathematician
April 29, 1854 - July 17, 1912

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.

Vladimir Lenin

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

Paul Dirac

There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The truly monumental can only come about by means of the most exact and refined relation between parts. Since each thing carries both a meaning of its own and an associated meaning in relation to something else - its essential value is relative. We speak of the mood we experience when looking at a landscape. This mood results from the relation of certain things rather than from their separate actualities. This is because objects do not in themselves possess the total effect they give when interrelated.

Hans Hofmann

I'm interested in that hybrid - the place between the real world and my imagination. There's a friction that's created between the things we imagine and the things that exist.

Laurel Nakadate

You can looking at that glass of water, not as a glass of water, but as paint on a two-dimensional surface. It's not just a question of looking, but of doing, in relation to this, in relation to that, in relation to the space between things.

Malcolm Morley

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

William James

In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

Constantin Brancusi

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.''

Alfred North Whitehead

Science has only two things to contribute to religion: an analysis of the evolutionary, cultural, and psychological basis for believing things that aren't true, and a scientific disproof of some of faith's claims (e.g., Adam and Eve, the Great Flood). Religion has nothing to contribute to science, and science is best off staying as far away from faith as possible. The "constructive dialogue" between science and faith is, in reality, a destructive monologue, with science making all the good points, tearing down religion in the process.

Jerry A. Coyne

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Steven Pinker

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

Edward Teller

It is often claimed that knowledge multiplies so rapidly that nobody can follow it. I believe this is incorrect. At least in science it is not true. The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler. This, of course, goes contrary to what everyone accepts.

Edward Teller

The whole point of science is that most of it is uncertain. That's why science is exciting--because we don't know. Science is all about things we don't understand. The public, of course, imagines science is just a set of facts. But it's not. Science is a process of exploring, which is always partial. We explore, and we find out things that we understand. We find out things we thought we understood were wrong. That's how it makes progress.

Freeman Dyson

Pettiness of mind, ignorance and presumption are the cause of stubbornness, because stubborn people only want to believe what they themselves can imagine, and they can imagine very few things.