Quotes about intuition
page 2

“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Music

“Doreen had intuition. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Secret

“A father's suspicion…' she began.
Is as powerful as a mother's intuition.'

~pg 87, Ruana Singh and Jack Salmon”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“To me, a witch is a woman that is capable of letting her intuition take hold of her actions, that communes with her environment, that isn't afraid of facing challenges.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Communication

“If we observe the totality of Camille Pissarro's works, we find there, despite the fluctuations, not only an extreme artistic will which never lies, but what is more, an essentially intuitive pure-bred art... He looked at everybody, you say! Why not? Everyone looked at him, too, but denied him. He was one of my masters and I do not deny him.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quote c. 1902, in Racontars d'un Rapin, Paul Gauguin; as quoted in 'Introduction' of Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien, ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro – (translated from the unpublished French letters by Lionel Abel); Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 15
After Paul Cezanne it was Gauguin who came to ask advice and painted landscape at the side of the much elder Pissarro. The traces of this apprenticeship as an impressionist were soon to disappear from Gauguin's works, but shortly before he died, he wrote these sentences about his former teacher
1890s - 1910s

Art

“I simply wanted to advance the field of artificial intelligence so that computers could do what they do best (organize and analyze information) to help people do what they do best, those inspired leaps of intuition that fuel original ideas and breakthroughs.”

Paul Allen (1953–2018) American inventor, investor and philanthropist

The Washington Post: "Thought process: Building an artificial brain" http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/09/30/brain/ (30 September 2015)

People, Intelligence, Idea, Help

“If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers. This leadership change gives you some breathing room to break bad habits and deliver sustainable customer happiness — don’t waste the opportunity!”

Andrew Mason (1981) businessman

Groupon CEO: “I Was Fired Today.” http://allthingsd.com/20130228/groupon-dumps-andrew-mason-as-ceo (February 28, 2013)

Wisdom, Happiness, Courage, Change

“At the end of the last book he published, The Law of Peoples, Rawls sets out the task of “reconciling” members of “liberal democratic” societies to their social order, and interprets his own previous work as contributing to that enterprise. Hegel tried to “reconcile” Prussians in the early 1820s with the Prussian state by showing that, although that state needed some far-reaching reforms, it was nevertheless fundamentally “rational” and conformed to all the intuitive demands for moral acceptability that its members might impose on it.” Similarly, Rawls’s work was an attempt to reconcile Americans to an idealised version of their own social order at the end of the twentieth century.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 89.

People, Books, Law

“If one thinks that ideological conceptions are an important feature of modern societies, and that the analysis of ideologies will therefore have to be an integral component of any contemporary political philosophy, Rawls’s view is seriously deficient, because it does not thematise power. The idea that seems to be presupposed by the doctrine of the veil of ignorance—namely, that one can in some way get a better grasp or understanding of the power relations in society and how they work by covering them up, ignoring them, or simply wishing them away—seems very naïve. To the extent, then, to which Rawls draws attention away from the phenomenon of power and the way in which it influences our lives and the way we see the world, his theory is itself ideological. To think that an appropriate point of departure for understanding the political world is our intuitions of what is “just,” without reflecting on where those intuitions come from, how they are maintained, and what interests they might serve, seems to exclude from the beginning the very possibility that these intuitions might themselves be “ideological.””

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 90.

World, Way, Idea, Departure

“Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

in 1985 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AXDT5824Y with John O'Sullivan <br class="br">1980s and later

Men, People, World, Family

“A mathematician is not a man who can readily manipulate figures; often he cannot. He is not even a man who can readily perform the transformation of equations by the use of calculus. He is primarily an individual who is skilled in the use of symbolic logic on a high plane, and especially he is a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

“Just as feelings grow out of ignorance, intuition should grow out of knowledge.”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

Annotated Drawings by Eugene J. Martin: 1977-1978

Feeling, Knowledge

“The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters. Trump operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents' vulnerabilities: "low energy", "little", "crooked", "fake". In the same way, Trump has intuited the weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other's differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off.”

David Frum (1960) American political commentator

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018)

Fear, Law, Way, Democracy

“I have the same idea with all my books: an attempt to come close to the core of reality, the structure of reality, as opposed to the merely superficial. The realistic novel is remote from art. A novel should heighten life, should give one an illuminating experience; it shouldn't set out what you know already. I just muddle away at it. One gets flashes here and there, which help. I am not a philosopher or an intellectual. Practically anything I have done of any worth I feel I have done through my intuition, not my mind - which the intellectuals disapprove of. And that is why I am anathema to certain kinds of Australian intellectual.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

Life, Books, Art, Feeling

“When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

Review of After the Fall, by Arthur Miller, at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, New York; Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin at the ANTA Theatre, New York (1962), p. 143
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Truth, Feeling, Future, Personality

“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

World, Beauty, Feeling, Mathematics

“Physics is essentially an intuitive and concrete science. Mathematics is only a means for expressing the laws that govern phenomena.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

From Lettre à Maurice Solvine, by A. Einstein (Gauthier-Villars: Paris 1956)
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: A guide for the perplexed (1979)

Law, Mathematics, Science

“The H-bomb is coming out of my intuitive and inspirationic command, for my spirit speaketh and speaketh psychologically, intuitively, and inspirationally and guides the destinies of the nations of the earth... My Assumption is the opposite of the atomic bomb. Instead of disintegration of matter, we have the integration, the reconstitution of the real and glorious body of the Virgin in the heavens.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from a review of Dali's exhibition at the Carstairs Gallery; 'The New Yorker', 20 December, 1952 p. 24
Dali is referring to one of his exhibited paintings there, very probably 'The Madonna of Port Lligat'
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1951 - 1960

“Culture produces relative consciousness of the changeable expression of reality. When this consciousness is attained, a revolt takes place: the beginning of the deliverance from that expression of reality. Destruction of its limitation follows. The culture of the intuitive faculties has conquered. A clearer perception of constant reality is possible. A new realism appears.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 18

Reality, Appearance

“For instance the idea of intuition, imagination, inspiration.... is related in the principle to an invisible world.... when I call these drawings 'The Secret Block' then I try to stress this part of reality as the most important part because spiritual existence is firstly... I find if we are only confronted with this hard part of the world, this already done part of the world, we are not.... related to the whole idea of reality.... the mission of the art is to make visible the whole reality..”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote from 'A. Beuys in the wilderness', 1974 (lecture at the Ulster Museum); as cited in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 198
1970's

Secret, World, Art, Imagination

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“As professor in the Polytechnic School [autumn of 1858] in Zurich I found myself for the first time obliged to lecture upon the elements of the differential calculus and felt, more keenly than ever before, the lack of a really scientific foundation for arithmetic. In discussing the notion of the approach of a variable magnitude to a fixed limiting value, and especially in proving the theorem that every magnitude which grows continually, but not beyond all limits, must certainly approach a limiting value, I had recourse to geometric evidences. Even now such resort to geometric intuition in a first presentation of the differential calculus, I regard as exceedingly useful, from the didactic standpoint, and indeed indispensable, if one does not wish to lose too much time. But that this form of introduction into the differential calculus can make no claim to being scientific, no one will deny. For myself this feeling of dissatisfaction was so overpowering that I made the fixed resolve to keep meditating on the question till I should find a purely arithmetic and perfectly rigorous foundation for the principles of infinitesimal analysis.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

p, 125
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

School, Feeling, Question, Autumn

“Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer.”

Doron Zeilberger (1950) Israeli mathematician

"Real" Analysis is a Degenerate Case of Discrete Analysis. Appeared in the book "New Progress in Difference Equations"(Proc. ICDEA 2001), edited by Bernd Aulbach, Saber Elaydi, and Gerry Ladas, and publisher by Taylor & Francis, London, 2004.

Wisdom, World, Fools, Evil

“In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Source: Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," 1967, p. 80. Cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/7/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 7

Art, Idea, Decision, Dependency

“The Atlanteans had no educational system as we understand the term. The kings and priests intuited; the masses obeyed.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Education in the New Age (1954), p. 40

Education, Understanding

“It is my interpretation that on the deepest archetypal level the feminist movement is partially fueled by an intuitive sensing of the decay and demise of the male. Women are rushing in to take men's places, as much for survival's sake as for any sociological or philosophical reasons. He has become a hyperactive, hyper-cerebral, hyper-mechanical, rigid, self-destructive machine out of control.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

The Cardboard Goliath, p. 8
The New Male (1979)

Women, Men, Sense

“…A column is not merely a round stick of stone: it is part of an entire symbolic system, which one cannot intuit simply by looking at it in isolation. The basic reason for studying such things is not merely technical or archivally historical but humanistic; it is to seek out the answer to what someone like Vitruvius meant by his (to us) mysterious comment that "a building should have the proportions of a man,"”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

Study, Parting

“On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all.
Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)

Life, Chance, Time

“The more I looked at his face [of Saint Sebastian] the more curious it seemed. That said, I seemed to have always known it and the aseptic morning light revealed its smallest details which such clarity, such purity, that I was impossible moved... In the upper part of the heliometer was St. Sebastian's magnifying glass... I put my eye to the magnifying glass, product of a slow distillation, at once numerical and intuitive. Each drop of water a number. Each drop of blood a geometry.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from his poem 'Sant Sebastia', Salvador Dali 1927 - dedicated to the Spanish poet Lorca; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, p. 46
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Light, Water, Parting

“There is also a considerable tendency to define the subject as a kind of meeting place of science and art. This is exemplified by Eckert. He pleads for artistic imagination and intuition in cartographic portrayal and claims that the inter-action of such talents with scientific geography produces the aesthetic map. There is no question about the importance of imagination and new ideas, but it is equally important that significant processes be objectively investigated, whether it be the visual consumption of a graphic technique or a process in geomorphology. It can perhaps best be approached by a comparison of the aims, techniques involved, and the results accomplished by each activity”

Arthur H. Robinson (1915–2004) American geographer

Source: The Look of Maps (1952), p. 17; as cited in: Kirk Patrick Goldsberry (2007) Real-time Traffic Maps. p. 23-24

Art, Imagination, Idea, Question

“The differential equation of the first order
\frac {dy}{dx} = f(x, y)
… prescribes the slope \frac {dy}{dx} at each point of the plane (or at each point of a certain region of the plane we call the field")…. a differential equation of the first order… can be conceived intuitively as a problem about the steady flow of a river: Being given the direction of the flow at each point, find the streamlines…. It leaves open the choice between the two possible directions in the line of a given slope. Thus… we should say specifically "direction of an unoriented straight line" and not merely "direction."”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Mathematical Methods in Science (1977)

Problem

“One of the temptations of upper-middle class life is to create sharp edges of our moral sensitivities and allows a comfortable confusions about sin and virtue. The difference between rich and poor is not that the rich sin is more than the poor, that the rich find it easier to call sin a virtue. When the poor sin, they call it sin; when they see holiness, they identify it as such. The intuitive clarity is often absent from the wealthy, and that absence easily leads to the atrophy of the moral sense.”

Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) Dutch priest and writer

Encounters with Merton

Life, Sense

“Only through intuition does a work rise above more or less subjective expression. Different periods produce different feelings and conceptions, and in each period men differ. Consequently different art expressions even in a single period are not only logical but a tribute to the general development of art. Intuition always finds the way of progress, which is continuous growth toward a clearer establishment of the content of art: the unification of man with the universe.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

'A New Realism', p. 17
1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945

Men, Art, Way, Feeling

“There aren't any even halfway reasonable dogmas around nowadays, not one that doesn't offend or outrage either the intellect or the intuitions.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 25

“There is a distinguishing difference of meaning between Jesus and Christ. His given name was Jesus; his honorific title was "Christ." In his little human body called Jesus was born the vast Christ Consciousness, the omniscient Intelligence of God omnipresent in every part and particle of creation. This Consciousness is the "only begotten Son of God," so designated because it is the sole perfect reflection in creation of the Transcendental Absolute, Spirit or God the Father.
It was of that Infinite Consciousness, replete with the love and bliss of God, that Saint John spoke when he said: "As many as received him [the Christ Consciousness], to them gave he power to become the sons of God." Thus according to Jesus' own teaching as recorded by his most highly advanced apostle, John, all souls who become united with Christ Consciousness by intuitive Self-realization are rightly called sons of God….”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, (2004) by Yogananda

Love, God, Soul, Intelligence

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom, Hunger, War, People

“I’m wondering whose side I ought to be on. I’m getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don’t give the poor chap a chance. There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.
‘So,’ continued Bond, warming to his argument, ‘Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.”

Ian Fleming book Casino Royale

Source: Casino Royale (1953), Ch. 20 : The Nature Of Evil

Men, People, Books, Nature

“The overly specific sexual orientation, then, reflects a basic division in consciousness. It not only separates a man from his own intuitions and emotions to some extent, or a woman from her own intellect, but it effectively provides a civilization in which mind and heart, fact and revelation, appear completely divorced. To some degree each person is at war with the psyche, for all of an individual’s human characteristics must be denied unless they fit in with those considered normal to the sexual identity.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 772, Page 81
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979)

War, Appearance, Heart, Personality

“The real solution to human longevity will likely involve both traditional and alternative medicine, scientific and philosophical problem-solving, as well as big data analysis and human intuition.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Problem

“All art originates in an act of intuition or vision.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Form in Modern Poetry(1932)

Art

“There [is] a feeling of recognition, as of meeting an old friend, which comes to us all in the face of great artistic experiences. I had the same experience when I first heard an English folksong, when I first saw Michelangelo's Day and Night, when I suddenly came upon Stonehenge or had my first sight of New York City – the intuition that I had been there already.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) English composer

"Musical Autobiography" (1950); cited from Ursula Vaughan Williams RVW (1964) p. 30.

Feeling, Night

“As so often I have pointed out, intuition is a level of the highest range. In details, I don’t have to think or to worry about the realization of my interpretation; no, it’s something that spreads out of my artistic all-compassion. Probably I have to be sorry for it, but this is my deepest artistic conviction for the rightness of an interpretation - interpretation as a summary of something unique and whole, not of a combining of details. Intuition is a level that includes all levels of emotion, intelligence, structure, and architecture. And I’m also confronted with the question of poetry and poesy, something that is so often neglected - especially in Bach.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Intelligence, Question, Thinking

“The idea that as I walk in this direction my watch goes slightly slower and I am contracted in the direction of motion and my mass has increased slightly does not correspond to everyday experience. …the reason that it does not correspond to common sense is that we are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. We may one day be in that habit, and then the Lorentz transformations will be natural, intuitive.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Travel, Idea, Nature, Sense

“Strategic intent describes a process of coping with turbulence through a direct, intuitive understanding of what is occurring in order to guide the work of a school. A turbulent environment cannot be tamed by rational analysis alone so that conventional strategic planning is deemed to be of little use. Yet it does not follow that a school's adaptive response must be left to a random distribution of lone individuals acting opportunistically and often in isolation as in a regime of intrapreneurship. Strategic intent relies on an intuitively formed pattern or gestalt”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

some would call it a vision — to give it unity and coherence
Source: Information Space, 1995, p. 36

School, Understanding

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J. D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

"Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way", Girl With Curious Hair
Short stories

Love, Dogs, Feeling, Fashion

“This project [an Impressionist exhibition in Paris] is very much up in the air. Degas' perversity makes it almost impossible of realization; there are clashes of vanity in this little group [of impressionists] that make any understanding difficult. It seems to me that I am the only one without any pettiness of character. This makes up for my inferiority as a painter.... the truth is that our value [of woman] lies in feeling, in intuition, in our vision that is subtler than that of men, and we can accomplish a great deal provided that affectation, pedantry and sentimentalism do not come to spoil everything.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

Quote of Berthe Morisot, 1885; as cited in Impressionist quartet, ed. Jeffrey Meyers; publishers, Harcourt, 2005, p. 94
Edgar Degas was the organizing force of most Impressionist exhibitions; this one never took place
1881 - 1895

Men, Truth, Feeling, Understanding

“When you live your life acting upon your deepest intuitions, no decision you ever make in life will be feared or a risk.”

Keshia Chante (1988) Canadian actor and musician

Official Website (2009)

Life, Fear, Decision

“An event recognised as responsible for the production of a certain outcome… Human intuition is extremely keen in detecting and ascertaining this type of causation and hence is considered the key to construct explanations… and the ultimate criterion (known as “cause in fact”) for determining legal responsibility.
Clearly, actual causation requires information beyond that of necessity and sufficiency: the actual process mediating between the cause and the effect must enter into consideration.”

Judea Pearl (1936) Computer scientist

Source: Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2000, p. 309, as cited in: Rinke Hoekstra (2009), Ontology Representation: Design Patterns and Ontologies... p. 181

“Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 56)

Personality

“What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 7 (p. 229).

God, Peace, Home, Reading

“Yet in a relatively short creative life of twenty years or so, Chopin redrew the boundaries of Romantic music, and his self-imposed restriction to the 88 keys of the piano keyboard sublimated nothing less than the aesthetic essence of piano music. It was his total identification with the instrument which, in its radical regeneration of the lyric and the dramatic, fantasy and passion and their unique fusion, shaped a tonal language which united an aristocratic sense of style and formal Classical training and intuition with an ascetic rigor. Chopin’s precisely marshaled trains of thought permitted no experiments, and so he did not ‘wander about’ within his stylistic points of reference as Scriabin was to do. Chopin’s works may seem light and improvisatory, but they are planned in meticulous details, exactly and well calculated.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Life, Music, Sense, Light

“The Buddha came embodying in Himself the divine quality of wisdom; He was the manifestation of Light, and the Teacher of the way of enlightenment. He demonstrated in Himself the processes of illumination and became "the Illumined One". Light, wisdom, reason, as divine yet human attributes, were focussed in the Buddha. He challenged the people to tread the Path of Illumination of which wisdom, mental perception and the intuition are aspects. Then came the next Teacher, the Christ. He embodied in Himself a still greater divine principle – greater than the Mind, that of Love; yet at the same time, He embraced within Himself all that the Buddha had of light. Christ was the expression of both light and love.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: Problems Of Humanity (1944), p. 150/1

Love, Wisdom, People, Way

“It may be true that only those minds which are habituated to think logically can safely trust their intuitive conclusions, on the theory that the subconscious level will do its kind of work as faithfully as the conscious does its kind.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 9.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Thinking

“Probability is too important to be left to the experts. […] The experts, by their very expert training and practice, often miss the obvious and distort reality seriously. […] The desire of the experts to publish and gain credit in the eyes of their peers has distorted the development of probability theory from the needs of the average user. The comparatively late rise of the theory of probability shows how hard it is to grasp, and the many paradoxes show clearly that we, as humans, lack a well grounded intuition in the matter. Neither the intuition of the man in the street, nor the sophisticated results of the experts provides a safe basis for important actions in the world we live in.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Source: The Art of Probability for Scientists and Engineers (1991), p. 4 [emphasis in original]

World, Reality, Training

“Some people like to talk of intuition as a way of knowing truth; that gut reactions are as good as evidence based facts. It’s a really silly way of thinking…”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

People, Truth, Way, Thinking

“In order to confine and kill animals for food, we must repress our natural compassion, warping us away from intuition and toward materialism, violence, and disconnectedness.”

Will Tuttle book The World Peace Diet

Preface
The World Peace Diet (2005)

Food, Nature, Animals

“Today every child knows what Merz is. But what is 'i'? I is the middle vowel of the alphabet and the designation for the consequence of Merz in relation to an intensive apprehension of the art form. For the shaping of the work of art Merz uses large ready-made complexes that count as material, to shorten as much as possible the path leading from the intuition to the actualization (Sichtbarmachung) of the artistic idea, so as to avoid heat loss through friction. i defines this path as o (i setzt diesen Weg = null). Idea, material, and work of art are the same. i apprehends the work of art in nature. Here the artistic shaping is the recognition of rhythm and expression in a part of nature. Thus, no loss through friction i. e., no disturbing distraction during creation occurs here.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1920s
Source: the article 'i ein Manifest' (or 'i-manifest'), Kurt Schwitters, in Merz 2. 1923; as quoted in Kurt Schwitters Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, by Elizabeth Burns Gamard, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2000, p. 116

Art, Idea, Nature, Loss

“You need to understand that informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use.”

Geoffrey Moore book Crossing the Chasm

Source: Crossing the Chasm, 1991, p. 67

Understanding, Decision

“Nearly conscious in someone like Michelangelo, or Paolo Uccello, quite intuitive in painters such as Ingres, or Corot, it works on the basis of numbers which belong to the painting itself, not to whatever it represents.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Painting

“I kept a diary during our White House years, and I have drawn upon it often in this book. I experience the world through my intuitions and feelings, and you’ll find out a lot about those in these pages.
My mother used to say, “Play the hand that’s dealt you,” and that is what I have always tried to do. And this, for better or worse, is how it seemed to me.”

Nancy Reagan book My Turn

Foreword
My Turn (1989)

Books, World, Feeling, Housing

“The human race, my intuition tells me, is not outside the cosmic process and is not an accident. It is as much a part of the universe as the trees, the mountains, the aurora, and the stars.”

Richard Evelyn Byrd (1888–1957) Medal of Honor recipient and United States Navy officer

Source: Alone (1938), Ch. 6

Mountain, Star, Tree, Universe

“The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society

Life, Justice, Art, Soul

“Only twice have I been sorry that I had had no college degree. Such degrees are frightfully overrated in this country and though I have no degrees I know I am as well educated as those who have. Not so many years ago I was asked to give a series of lectures at The Postgraduate College in Washington, D. C. I was to speak on the intellect and the intuition… when they discovered I had no degrees… they proceeded to cancel the lectures… Shortly after I was asked by Cornell University… to speak to them on the modern spiritual approach to truth… This was also cancelled because I had no college degrees.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter 6

Truth, Education, Universe, Country

“This is a difficult goal to present to teachers, coming as it does at a time when education is under attack from many quarters. But our society is changing rapidly and the difficulties of foreseeing what kinds of skills future generations will require are increasing. Although we have so far depended on the rational, left half of the human brain to plan our children's future and to solve the problems they might encounter on the way to that future, the onslaught of profound change is shaking our confidence in technological thinking and in the old methdods of education. Without abandoning training in tradtional verbal and computational skills, concerned teachers are looking for teaching techniques that will enchance children's intuitive and creative powers, thus preparing students to meet new challenges with flexibility, inventiveness, and imagination and with the ability to grasp complex arrays of interconnected ideas and facts, to perceive underlying patterns of events, and to see old problems in new ways.”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.196

Children, Education, Way, Confidence

“I believe that it is possible by means of horizontal and vertical lines, constructed 'consciously' but not 'calculating', guided by a higher intuition and brought to harmony and rhythm – I believe that these fundamental aesthetic shapes – where necessary supplemented by lines in other directions or curved lines, make it possible to arrive at a work of art which is as strong as it is true. For anyone who sees more deeply, there is nothing vague about this; it is only vague for the superficial observer of nature. And 'chance' must be as far removed as 'calculation'. And for the rest it seems to me that it is necessary to keep breaking off the horizontal or vertical line: for if these directions were not countered by others, they would themselves come to signify something 'specific' and thus human.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote of Mondrian in a letter to H. P. Bremmer, Paris 29 January 1914; ; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 81
1910's

Art, Nature, Strong, Chance

“The typographic logic created “the outsider,” the alienated mass, as the type of integral, that is, intuitive and irrational, man.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 241

“Environment, education, experience, make men conscious of passing reality but overwhelm their intuitive capacity when this is not very strong.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: 1940's, A New Realism', 1943-1945, p. 17

Men, Education, Reality, Strong

“If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the aesthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All this decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, The Creative Act', 1957

Decision

“Each painting has its own way of evolving. One may start with a few color areas on the canvas; another with a myriad of lines, another with a profusion of colors... Once I sense the suggestion I begin to paint intuitively. The suggestion then becomes a phantom that must be caught and made real. As I work, or when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.”

William Baziotes (1912–1963) American painter

I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory, William Baziotes, in Possibilities, Vol. I, no. 1, New York, winter 1947-48, p. 2
William Baziotes is referring in this quote to Surrealist automatism originally a surrealist art concept
1940s

Color, Way, Sense, Painting

“What is all this? Let him conceive it if he can, express it if he knows how, if he desires to; if one can it is licit, but it is better to shut up as one should; because it is here that our intuitive joy, respectively and mutually in us both, speaks, not of this nor anything like it, but something infinitely other than this, by its profundity, and perpetual and ineffable silence.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From The Epithalamium

Silence, Joy

“We [at the Bauhaus, in Dessau - where Klee was art teacher with Kandinsky ] construct and construct, and yet intuition still has its uses. Without it we can do a lot, but not everything... When intuition is joined to exact research it speeds the progress of exact research..”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

1921 - 1930
Source: 'Bauhaus prospectus 1929'; as quoted in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444

Art, Teachers, Speed

“Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect wishes to arrange — intuition wishes to accept.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

A Second Outline in Portraiture (1936), as quoted in Marsden Hartley, Gail R. Scott - Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York, p. 167
1930s

“This museum is like a ghost train—at every stage you find a surprise. Intuition prepares you for enlightenment, not audio-visual lectures. There's less to read, more to fee.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck cited in: Priscilla Boniface, Peter Jon Fowler (1993) Heritage and Tourism: In the Global Village. p. 161: Starck is talking about the Groninger Museum.

Reading, Training

“The difference between the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fact we were just speaking of—the fact that no man would care for vengeance on one who had injured him, provided he knew that all memory of the offence had been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind—proves the entire proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between the two.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Dr. Heidenhoff's Process http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7052/7052-h/7052-h.htm (1880), Ch. 11.

Memory, Past, Personality

“If he [the metaphysician] takes an empiricist position in regard to the source of knowledge and a realist one in regard to the limits of knowledge, he will see no need or even possibility of seeking a world-view other than that provided by science as based on experience. If he inclines towards an aprioristic position, or even more, if he is convinced by the arguments of irrationalists, he will seek his world-view in an aprioristic way, or he will appeal to intuition or mystical experience”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Source: Problems and theories of philosophy, 1949, p. 166–167, as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.

World, Way, Knowledge, Science

“The hippies are the living demonstration of what it means to give up reason, and to rely on one's primeval instincts, urges, intuitions, and whims. With such tools, they are unable to grasp even what is needed to satisfy their wishes; for example, the wish to have a festival. Where would they be without the charity of the local "squares" who fed them? Where would they be without the fifty doctors rushed from New York to save their lives? Without the automobiles that brought them to the festival? Without the soda pop and beer they substituted for water? Without the helicopters that brought the entertainers? Without all the achievements of the technological civilization they denounce? Left to their own devices, they literally didn't know enough to come in out of the rain.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Apollo and Dionysus (1969)

Beer, Water

“Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually "natural" actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra's direction, she plays a tough "party" girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Ladies of Leisure," p. 403
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Way, Girl, Understanding, Nature

“If you look at the history of big obstacles in understanding our world, there's usually an intuitive assumption underlying them that's wrong. In the case of the Solar System it was intuitively obvious that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System and things moved around us, but that just turned out to be wrong. … And it intuitively seems correct that the brain is just some sort of computer—it just seems natural. … But it has undermined almost all of our work to build intelligent machines and understand thinking. It's just wrong … the brain isn't like a computer at all.”

Jeff Hawkins (1957) American entrepreneur and neuroscientist; founder of Palm Computing

Morning Edition interview http://www.rni.org/hawkins/Jeff_Hawkins_On_Intelligence.mp3

World, History, Intelligence, Understanding

“Perl should remain fast and intuitive”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

to the extent that it is :-
[199804151704.KAA12290@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

“The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public’s reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: “The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition.””

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety (2004), pp. 116-117.

Idea, Thinking, Sense, Suffering

“Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), p. 21.

Life, Shoe, Imagination, Thinking

“As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but between them.
If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Source: Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self, 1970, pp.186-7 cited in: Vincent Kenny (2010) Remembering Ernst von Glasersfeld http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm at oikos.org, retrieved Oct 11, 2012.

World, Way, Nature, Thinking

“Merz art strives for immediate expression by shortening the path from intuition to visual manifestation of the artwork.... they will receive my new work as they always have when something new presents itself: with indignation and screams of scorn.”

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) German artist

1910s
Source: 'Merz Painting' (1919); as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, p. 91.

Art

“Indeed, it is not intellect, but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells man his purpose in this life.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 103

Life

“The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1931 - 1940, My Pictorial Struggle', S. Dali, 1935, Chapter: 'My Pictorial Struggle', pp. 11-12

Understanding, Painting

“The functional validity of a working hypothesis is not a priori certain, because often it is initially based on intuition. However, logical deductions from such a hypothesis provide expectations (so called prognoses) as to the circumstances under which certain phenomena will appear in nature. Such a postulate or working hypothesis can then be substantiated by additional observations or by experiments especially arranged to test details. The value of the hypothesis is strengthened if the observed facts fit the expectation within the limits of permissible error.”

Reinout Willem van Bemmelen (1904–1983) Dutch geologist

Source: "The Scientific Character of Geology," 1961, p. 454; As cited in: Alberta Research Council, ‎Research Council of Alberta (1964), Bulletin - Alberta Research Council. Vol. 15-17, p. 31

Error, Nature, Appearance

“They [laboratory groups] bypass such questions as how one comes to know that a problem exists, what it does to solution adequacy to be working on several different things concurrently with problem solving, what it's like to go about solving a felt, intuited problem rather than an explicitly stated consensually validated problem which was made visible to all members at a specific point in time.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl E. Weick (1971, p. 9), as cited in: Harry L. Davis. " Decision Making within the Household http://www.unternehmenssteuertag.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Redaktion/Seco@home/nachhaltiger_Energiekonsum/Literatur/entscheidungen_haushalte/Decision_Making_within_the_Household.pdf," The Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 2, No. 4. (Mar., 1976), pp. 241-260. <br class="br">1970s

Question, Problem, Time

“When terms… evolve and change definition with time; and when the social reality which terms are intended to organize and render intelligible is also seen to be in flux, capturing the truth in a net of words becomes a matter of intuition and style more than of any scientific method that can be replicated by others and made to achieve the same result every time someone asks the same question, or undertakes the same operations.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)

Truth, Intelligence, Question, Reality

“Parents are frequently inclined, because of a time-flattered sense of security, to take their children for granted. Nothing ever has happened, so nothing ever will happen. They see their children every day, and through the eyes of affection; and despite their natural charm and their own strong parental love, the children are apt to become not only commonplaces, but ineffably secure against evil. […] The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic. […] But it is possible. Very possible. Decidedly likely. Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant. They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice. Others collapse before the grave manifestation of the insecurity and uncertainty of life—the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is unsolvable—we who think. The remainder imagine a vain thing, and are full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. XXVI

Love, Life, Children, Hope

“A new view of the role of art and science in cartography is clearly needed. It is probably a mistake to view maps as objects that contain varied amounts of scientific or artistic content for which we must determine an appropriate balance (as both Keates, 1984, and Robinson, 1952, seem to, with Keates arguing for more art and Robinson for more science). Instead, it makes more sense to consider complementary artistic and scientific approaches to studying and improving maps, both of which can be applied to any given cartographic problem. The artistic approach is intuitive and holistic, achieving improvements through experience supplemented by critical examination (where critical examination implies expert appraisal of the results of our cartographic decision-making efforts). It draws on science in using perspective, understanding of human vision, color theory, and so on.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 9

Art, Color, Understanding, Problem

“The ancient Greeks, as Plato reports, believed that we discover truth through "reminiscence," that is by "remembering," by intuitively searching into our own experience.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 214

Truth, Search

“In evaluating the adequacy of the sampled and anticipated outcomes of a relationship, the members of a dyad will have need for some kind of standard or criterion of the acceptability of outcomes. At least two important kinds of standard for such an evaluation can be identified. To try to make the distinction between these two standards as intuitively clear as possible, we may begin by saying that the first of these, called the comparison level (or CL), is the standard against which a member evaluates the 'attractiveness' of the relationship or how satisfactory it is. The second, called the comparison level for alternatives (or CLalt), is the standard the member uses in deciding whether to remain in or to leave the relationship.”

John Thibaut (1917–1986) American social psychologist

Source: The social psychology of groups. 1959, p. 21

“However, in all honesty, I must say that one must essentially forget that all proofs are transcribed in this formal language. In order to think productively, one must use all the intuitive and informal methods of reasoning at one's disposal. At the very end one must check that no errors have been committed; but in practice set theory is treated as any other branch of mathematics. The reason that we can do this is that we will never speak about proofs but only about models.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

p. 1078 of "The discovery of forcing." http://www.logic.univie.ac.at/~ykhomski/ST2013/The%20Discovery%20of%20Forcing.pdf Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics 32, no. 4 (2002): 1071–1100.

Error, Mathematics, Thinking, Forgetting

“The main objection to the theory of pure visualization is our thesis that the non-Euclidean axioms can be visualized just as rigorously if we adjust the concept of congruence. This thesis is based on the discovery that the normative function of visualization is not of visual but of logical origin and that the intuitive acceptance of certain axioms is based on conditions from which they follow logically, and which have previously been smuggled into the images. The axiom that the straight line is the shortest distance is highly intuitive only because we have adapted the concept of straightness to the system of Eucidean concepts. It is therefore necessary merely to change these conditions to gain a correspondingly intuitive and clear insight into different sets of axioms; this recognition strikes at the root of the intuitive priority of Euclidean geometry. Our solution of the problem is a denial of pure visualization, inasmuch as it denies to visualization a special extralogical compulsion and points out the purely logical and nonintuitive origin of the normative function. Since it asserts, however, the possibility of a visual representation of all geometries, it could be understood as an extension of pure visualization to all geometries. In that case the predicate "pure" is but an empty addition, since it denotes only the difference between experienced and imagined pictures, and we shall therefore discard the term "pure visualization."”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

Instead we shall speak of the normative function of the thinking process, which can guide the pictorial elements of thinking into any logically permissible structure.
The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Imagination, Problem, Thinking, Change

“My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity--intuition and compassion and tenderness--and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.”

Carlos Santana (1947) Mexican and American rock musician

Carlos Santana on his father.http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2000_Summer/ai_63500762

Men, Beauty, Problem

“[in response to a question about what was meant by his "cosmic religion"] It is not a religion that teaches that man is made in the image of God—that is anthropomorphic. Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience. This religion has no dogma other than teaching man that the universe is rational and that his highest destiny is to ponder it and co-create with its laws. There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to us is as important as what is cut and dried; and, second, that our faculties are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and serene beauty in crude forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads us to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe. My religion is based on Moses: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And for me God is the First Cause. David and the prophets knew that there could be no love without justice or justice without love. I don't need any other religious trappings.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 108

Love, Wisdom, God, Religion

“Pure mathematics is a collection of hypothetical, deductive theories, each consisting of a definite system of primitive, undefined, concepts or symbols and primitive, unproved, but self-consistent assumptions (commonly called axioms) together with their logically deducible consequences following by rigidly deductive processes without appeal to intuition.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

The Fourth Dimension simply Explained. (New York, 1910), p. 58. Reported in Moritz (1914); Also cited in: Howard Eves (2012), Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics, p. 167

Mathematics

“Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[199809230518.WAA19312@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Study

“Using complex, constructive, noise-producing abstraction, that is, the Futurist Style. Any action developed in space, any emotion felt, will represent for us the intuition of a discovery.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (1915)