Quotes About Intuitions

the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words. But it will fail to convince or convert you all the same, if your dumb intuitions are opposed to its conclusions.

Toute transformation sociale (...) s'est fondée sur de nouvelles bases métaphysiques et idéologiques; ou plutôt, sur des émotions et intuitions plus profondes, dont l'expression rationalisée prend la forme du cosmos et de la nature de l'homme.

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings.

In his stimulating book Knowledge and Its Place in Nature (2002), Kornblith addresses the claim that epistemic norms must appeal to a priori intuitions. The standard practice of philosophical

La mejor literatura es la que está hecha de preguntas más que de respuestas, de intuiciones más que de certezas, de dudas más que de convicciones.

But when we integrate those embedded experiences into our present consciousness and recognize them as implicit memories—not valid intuitions or reasoned decisions—then we begin to offer ourselves the means to become awakened and active authors of our own life story.

Those who avoid the sin of intellectual sloth could be called "engaged." They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, more skeptical about their intuitions.

I don't place much faith in my intuitions, except as a starting place for designing experiments.

I had only an imperfect understanding of the nature to which I was bound, whereas today I know the truth about it, at least from a subjective point of view. As for its objective truth, that is, whether these semi-hidden intuitions were any better than my reasoning at capturing Albertine's real intentions, and whether I was right to trust to my nature or whether it did not in fact distort Albertine's intentions instead of clarifying them, is difficult for me now to say.

It is only too evident that the invisible agitations of the kingdoms within us are arbitrarily set on foot by the thoughts we shelter. Our myriad intuitions are the veiled queens who steer our course through life, though we have no words in which to speak of them. How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words!

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.