Quotes About Intuition

Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be done.

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.

Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don't know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more.

In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious

We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.

As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge.

Everything psychic is pregnant with the future.

The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.

all the higher grades of science, imagination and intuition play an increasingly important role over and above intellect and its capacity for application.

A work of art must relate something that does not appear in its visible form.

Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.

Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts. In this way, we can orientate ourselves with respect to the immediate world as completely as when we locate a place geographically by latitude and longitude.

Intuition does not say what things 'mean' but sniffs out their possibilities. 'Meaning' is given by thinking.

Just as the world of appearances can never become a moral problem for the man who merely senses it, the world of inner images is never a moral problem for the intuitive. For both of them it is an aesthetic problem, a matter of perception, a "sensation.

But it also happens at times that dreams genuinely tell us something about other people. In this way, the unconscious plays a role that is far from being fully understood. Like all the higher forms of life, man is in tune with the living beings around him to a remarkable degree. He perceives their sufferings and problems, their positive and negative attributes and values, instinctively-quite independently of his conscious thoughts about other people.

Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal the patient. What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says "Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart." A neurosis is a dissociation of personality.

I have therefore defined sensation as perception through conscious sensory processes, and intuition as perception by way of unconscious contents and connections.

When we think, it is in order to judge or to reach a conclusion, and when we feel it is in order to attach a proper value to something; sensation and intuition, on the other hand, are perceptive—they make us aware of what is happening, but do not interpret or evaluate it. They do not act selectively according to principles, but are simply receptive of what happens. But "what happens" is merely nature, and therefore essentially non-rational.

I only know there is no point in wishing to know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams and intuition. The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes your moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they begin to become conscious. Do you want to find more and more complications and increasing responsibilities?

No experienced worker in this field will deny that there are rules of thumb that can prove helpful, but they must be applied with prudence and intelligence. One may follow all the right rules and yet get bogged down in the most appalling nonsense, simply by overlooking a seemingly unimportant detail that a better intelligence would not have missed. Even a man of high intellect can go badly astray for lack of intuition or feeling.

One can explain and know only if one has reduced intuitions to an exact knowledge of facts and their logical connections.

The sensation type is in every respect the converse of the intuitive. He relies almost exclusively on his sense impressions, and his whole psychology is oriented by instinct and sensation. He is therefore entirely dependent on external stimuli.

We find . . . in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations . . . from the unconscious.