Henri Poincaré

The human mind is a light in the darkness.

If there were no natural objects, there would be no geometry.

The laws of nature are not absolute truths, but conventions that we adopt for convenience.

There is no absolute truth in science; there are only more or less convenient conventions.

The object of mathematical rigor is to sanction and legitimize the conquests of intuition, and there never was any other object.

The only objective reality is the harmony of the world, and it is in this harmony that we must seek all truth.

The axioms of geometry are neither synthetic a priori judgments nor experimental facts. They are conventions.

A scientific theory is not a collection of facts, but an organization of facts.

The aim of science is not to discover the true nature of things, but to find the best way to represent them.

The principle of relativity, in its broadest sense, is a postulate that the laws of physics are the same for all observers in uniform motion.

The hypothesis of the ether is no longer necessary.

The notion of absolute time is a convenient fiction.

The future is not determined by the present, but by the past and the present.

The true method of discovery is to have no method.

The most fruitful ideas are those which are not immediately obvious.

The role of mathematics is not to prove the obvious, but to make the obscure obvious.

The scientist does not create the world, but he reveals it.

The most important discoveries are those that open up new fields of research.

The value of a scientific theory is not in its truth, but in its utility.

The laws of chance are not laws of nature, but laws of our ignorance.