It is only through science and art that civilization is of value. Some have wondered at the formula: science for its own sake; an yet it is as good a… - Henri Poincaré

Despite the employment of the most highly perfected methods, the raw results of our experience will always present the characteristics of the physical continuum with the contradiction which is inherent in it.

Everyone is sure of this [that errors are normally distributed], Mr. Lippman told me one day, since the experimentalists believe that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians that it is an experimentally determined fact.

Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, btu I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience's sake I verified the result at my leisure.