# Quote — Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science

> All laws are... deduced from experiment; but to enunciate them, a special language is needful... ordinary language is too poor...
>
> This... is one reason why the physicist can not do without mathematics; it furnishes him the only language he can speak. And a well-made language is no indifferent thing;
>
> ...the analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist.
>
> ...law springs from experiment, but not immediately. Experiment is individual, the law deduced from it is general; experiment is only approximate, the law is precise...
>
> In a word, to get the law from experiment, it is necessary to generalize... But how generalize? ...in this choice what shall guide us?
>
> It can only be analogy. ...What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?
>
> It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.

- Author: [Henri Poincaré](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare.md)
- Book: [The Value of Science](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare/the-value-of-science.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henri_Poincar%C3%A9#Ch._5:_Analysis_and_Physics) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Topics: [science](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/science.md)
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare/the-value-of-science/all-laws-are

## More from this book

> Does the harmony the human intelligence thinks it discovers in nature exist outside of this intelligence? No, beyond doubt, a reality completely independent of the mind which conceives it, sees or feels it, is an impossibility. A world as exterior as that, even if it existed, would for us be forever inaccessible.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare/the-value-of-science/does-the-harmony.md)

> Time and Space … It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare/the-value-of-science/time-and-space.md)

> The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new, but to the continuous evolution of zoologic types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the common sight, but where an expert eye finds always traces of the prior work of the centuries past. One must not think then that the old-fashioned theories have been sterile or vain.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare/the-value-of-science/the-advance-of-science.md)