Selected intuition quotes

1. You know more than you think you do.

2. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

3. The most dangerous lovers women have are men of Cordis's feminine temperament. Such men, by the delicacy and sensitiveness of their own organizations, read women as easily and accurately as women read each other. They are alert to detect and interpret those smallest trifles in tone, expression, and bearing, which betray the real mood far more unmistakably than more obvious signs.

4. Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

5. I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist - I played by ear.

6. Genius sees the answer before the question.

7. As early pioneers in the knowing, that when you lose your reason, you attain highest perfect knowing.

8. I've listened to Jazz since I was born and always knew I'd be a Jazz singer!

9. Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.

10. A person knows when it just seems to feel right to them. Listen to your heart.

11. My unconscious knows more about the consciousness of the psychologist than his consciousness knows about my unconscious.

12. Instinct is the direct connection with truth.

13. What we need to know about loving is no great mystery. We all know what constitutes loving behavior; we need but act upon it, not continually question it. Over-analysis often confuses the issue and in the end brings us no closer to insight. We sometimes become too busy classifying, separating, and examining, to remember that love is easy. It's we who make it complicated.

14. Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.

15. Gardening is not a rational act.

16. The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.

17. Those things that nature denied to human sight, she revealed to the eyes of the soul.

18. I am more the inspirational type of speller. I work on hunches rather than mere facts, and the result is sometimes open to criticism by purists.

19. Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.

20. Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

21. Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

22. He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibility and speech.

23. All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.

24. The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

25. One in whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition.

26. 'God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

27. Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity. The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning... The exercise of ingenuity in mathematics consists in aiding the intuition through suitable arrangements of propositions, and perhaps geometrical figures or drawings.

28. The only real valuable thing is intuition. The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.

29. The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

30. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in me - not in the external world. I asked, was it a mere nervous impression - a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration.

31. Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense...

32. The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.

33. The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

34. 'I'll play it and tell you what it is later.'

35. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

36. Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit, and the muse; Nothing refuse.

37. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

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

39. Great thoughts, great feelings came to them, Like instincts, unawares.

40. The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest.

41. What I'm telling you is, there's some people who do things so bad it tears the fabric of the world, and then there's some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they're so good and pure that they don't understand what it is that they're seeing

42. Ansset did not understand the words, but the tone of voice was clear. He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them

43. She said, 'Do you know this Hitler? Have you ever met him?' I said, 'Do I - of course I don't!' She said, 'Well how are you going to know which is him if they do land?' I said, 'Well, I've got a tongue in my head, haven't I?'

44. I am convinced that human continuance depends entirely upon: the intuitive wisdom of each and every individual . . . the individual's integrity of speaking and acting only on the individual's own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative . . . the individual's never joining action with others as motivated only by crowd-engendered-emotionalism, or a sense of the crowd's power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one's own intellectual convictions.

45. In describing the scene Lucy said afterwards, 'He was the size of an elephant,' though at another time she only said, 'The size of a cart-horse.' But it was not the size that mattered. Nobody dared to ask what it was. They knew it was Aslan. (ch. 8)

46. Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately. There is a question that a warrior has to ask: 'Does this path have a heart?'

47. Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

48. I think it is more like a ghost that has been following us both. Something vague that we're not seeing, something more like a feeling.

49. If it sounds good, it IS good.

50. I don't pursue anything. The only thing I always answer is my own impulse.

51. Look to the Great Eternal Cause And not to any man, for light. Look in; and learn the wrong, and right, From your own soul's unwritten laws. And when you question, or demur, Let Love be your Interpreter.

52. There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an 'overjoyed hero,' counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.

53. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption - in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch.

54. That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

55. I don't have a technique. I've never been a believer in having one set technique on how to act. There are no rules and there is no rulebook. At the end of the day, it all comes down to my instincts. That's the one thing that guides me through every decision professionally. Socially, also. That's my technique. Yeah, you read through the script 100 times. I guess I have little characteristics about myself. Sometimes, most often than not, once we start shooting I won't look at the script at all until we finished shooting. It's kind of like it's been imprinted in my head during rehearsals. You just let it go.

56. Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.

57. Poetry - No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.

58. 'My music is best understood by children and animals.'

59. All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

60. Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

61. Something in me knows where I'm going, and - well, painting is a state of being.

62. When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

63. My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

64. I think I know what happens.

65. I am convinced, Yorick, continued my father, half reading and half discoursing, that there is a Northwest Passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it.

66. The cop climbed out of his car exactly four minutes before he got shot. He moved like he knew his fate in advance.

67. If you gotta ask, you'll never know.

68. Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.

69. Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

70. On his good mornings, I don't suppose there are more than a handful of men in the W. 1 postal district of London swifter to spot oompus-boompus than Bertram Wooster, and this was one of my particularly good mornings. I saw the whole hideous plot.

71. Story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free.

72. I do things differently, because I don't go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head, and albeit that's got me into trouble in my work, I understand that.

73. I have a woman's instinct, and it's always a good one.

74. 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.

75. The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge.

76. A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. 'The ancient Greeks,' I say, 'who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?'

77. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

78. When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.

79. I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

80. The deepest pleasure in science comes from finding an instantiation, a home, for some deeply felt, deeply held image.

81. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard - of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

82. If you're listening to this song You may think the chords are going wrong But they're not We just wrote it like that

83. Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No - not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping

84. The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in 'the discarding of words', it lies 'outside words'. And so we have the extreme of 'silence like thunder', in the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra.

85. Find first, seek later.

86. I smell a rat.