# Quote — Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science

> What we call objective reality is, in the last analysis, what is common to many thinking beings, and could be common to all; this common part, we shall see, can only be the harmony expressed by mathematical laws. It is this harmony... which is the sole objective reality, the only truth we can attain; and when I add that the universal harmony of the world is the source of all beauty, it will be understood what price we should attach to the slow and difficult progress which little by little enables us to know it better.

- 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#Introduction) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Topics: [science](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/science.md), [truth](https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/truth.md)
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/henri-poincare/the-value-of-science/what-we-call

## 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)