Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that extreme beliefs, whether doubt or certainty, eliminate the necessity for deep thinking.
Henri Poincare highlights that both doubt and blind belief are shortcuts that lead to a lack of critical thinking and self-reflection. By relying on either extremity, one avoids the nuanced understanding and contemplation that come with truly engaging with ideas and beliefs. The emphasis is on the importance of reflective thinking over simplistic binaries.
In practice
In a discussion about critical thinking at a seminar.
When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole; it is to intuition that we must look for it.
It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.
A scientist worthy of his name, about all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.
. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a physical law. They reveal the kinship between other facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.
What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils.
Niggas hate what they can't understand, fear what they can't conquer
All wars are won or lost before they are ever fought.
Ipsa scientia potestas est. (Knowledge itself is power.)
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!
A pure heart, open to the Light, will be filled with the elixir of Truth.
He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.
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