Quotes about intuition

It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.

Logic teaches us that on such and such a road we are sure of not meeting an obstacle; it does not tell us which is the road that leads to the desired end. For this, it is necessary to see the end from afar, and the faculty which teaches us to see is intuition. Without it, the geometrician would be like a writer well up in grammar but destitute of ideas.

The principal aim of mathematical education is to develop certain faculties of the mind, and among these intuition is not the least precious. It is through it that the mathematical world remains in touch with the real world, and even if pure mathematics could do without it, we should still have to have recourse to it to fill up the gulf that separates the symbol from reality.

Never give up if your heart and your head tell you are right. People can disappoint you, but your heart and your head will never. Make them your best friends.

It's like Dad said: moments of cosmic consciousness could simply be a natural reaction to a sudden unconscious awareness of our own mortality. For all we know, the feeling of unity might be the greatest proof of separateness there is. Who knows? Just because they feel like genuine apprehensions of Truth doesn't mean they are. I mean, if you mistrust one sense, you must mistrust them all. There's no reason the sixth sense might not be as misleading as smell or sight. That's the lesson I've learned from my father, the headline news from the corner that he thought himself into: direct intuitions as as untrustworthy as they are potent.

But what argument could I offer? It was nothing but an irrational feeling—the kind of “premonition” we get from time to time but remember only on the rare occasions when it is fulfilled by the event. I had no evidence.

I passed that off as women’s intuition, which is wrong more often than not. People remember the times it works and forget those it fails.

“I barely looked at him, but he seemed kind of creepy.”

Tengo put the card into his wallet. “I suspect that impression wouldn’t change even if you had more time to look at him,” he said.

“I always tell myself not to judge people by their appearance. I’ve been wrong in the past and had some serious regrets. But the minute I saw this man, I got the feeling that he couldn’t be trusted. I still feel that way.”

“You’re not alone,” Tengo said.

He had defined intuition for Sondra: it was what remained after all the facts had been forgotten. But intuition could also be something else. Sometimes it was the subconscious mind, establishing deep connections long before the thinking part of the brain could explain them.

I think my inner voices are pretty good when it comes to warning of trouble. The problem is, I don’t always listen to them.

The progress of mathematics has been most erratic, and... intuition has played a predominant rôle in it. ...It was the function of intuition to create new forms; it was the acknowledged right of logic to accept or reject these new forms, in whose birth in had no part. ...the children had to live, so while waiting for logic to sanctify their existence, they throve and multiplied.

The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.