Intuitive Quotes (14 quotes)
…there is no prescribed route to follow to arrive at a new idea. You have to make the intuitive leap. But the difference is that once you’ve made the intuitive leap you have to justify it by filling in the intermediate steps. In my case, it often happens that I have an idea, but then I try to fill in the intermediate steps and find that they don’t work, so I have to give it up.
In Michael Harwood, 'The Universe and Dr. Hawking', New York Times Magazine (23 Jan 1983), 53.
“Healing,” Papa would tell me, “is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing Nature.”
From 'The Art of Healing' (1969), Epistle to a Godson: And Other Poems (1972), 7. (Auden’s father was a physician.) The memorial poem was written on the death of his friend, Dr. David Protetch.
Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind is a faithful servant. It it paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.
In The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness (1976), 26. Note that these words are the author’s own free interpretation Einstein’s views. He is not directly quoting Einstein’s words. No verbatim version appears in Einstein writings. A variant of Samples’ words has become misattributed as an Einstein quote: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant; we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
Astronomy was thus the cradle of the natural sciences and the starting point of geometrical theories. The stars themselves gave rise to the concept of a ‘point’; triangles, quadrangles and other geometrical figures appeared in the constellations; the circle was realized by the disc of the sun and the moon. Thus in an essentially intuitive fashion the elements of geometrical thinking came into existence.
In George Edward Martin, The Foundations of Geometry and the Non-Euclidean Plane (1982), 72.
By the early 1960s Pauling had earned a reputation for being audacious, intuitive, charming, irreverent, self-promoting, self-reliant, self-involved to the point of arrogance and correct about almost everything.
In Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling (1995), 13.
If it were always necessary to reduce everything to intuitive knowledge, demonstration would often be insufferably prolix. This is why mathematicians have had the cleverness to divide the difficulties and to demonstrate separately the intervening propositions. And there is art also in this; for as the mediate truths (which are called lemmas, since they appear to be a digression) may be assigned in many ways, it is well, in order to aid the understanding and memory, to choose of them those which greatly shorten the process, and appear memorable and worthy in themselves of being demonstrated. But there is another obstacle, viz.: that it is not easy to demonstrate all the axioms, and to reduce demonstrations wholly to intuitive knowledge. And if we had chosen to wait for that, perhaps we should not yet have the science of geometry.
In Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz and Alfred Gideon Langley (trans.), New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1896), 413-414.
Men are of three different capacities; one understands intuitively, another only understands so far as it is explained; and a third understands neither of himself nor by explanation; the first is excellent, the second commendable, and the third altogether useless.
Collected, without citation, in Day's Collacon: an Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations (1884), 87.
Men of science belong to two different types—the logical and the intuitive. Science owes its progress to both forms of minds. Mathematics, although a purely logical structure, nevertheless makes use of intuition. Among the mathematicians there are intuitives and logicians, analysts and geometricians. Hermite and Weierstrass were intuitives. Riemann and Bertrand, logicians. The discoveries of intuition have always to be developed by logic.
In Man the Unknown (1935), 123.
Mother of all the sciences, it [mathematics] is a builder of the imagination, a weaver of patterns of sheer thought, an intuitive dreamer, a poet.
In The American Mathematical Monthly (1949), 56, 19. Excerpted in John Ewing (ed,), A Century of Mathematics: Through the Eyes of the Monthly (1996), 186.
The mathematically formulated laws of quantum theory show clearly that our ordinary intuitive concepts cannot be unambiguously applied to the smallest particles. All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as position, velocity, color, size, and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use them of elementary particles.
In Across the Frontiers (1974), 114.
The physician would be even worse off than he is, if not for the occasional emergence of common sense which breaks through dogmas with intuitive freshness.
In Robots Or Gods: An Essay on Craft and Mind (1931), 62.
There are two types of mind … the mathematical, and what might be called the intuitive. The former arrives at its views slowly, but they are firm and rigid; the latter is endowed with greater flexibility and applies itself simultaneously to the diverse lovable parts of that which it loves.
In Discours sur les passions de l’amour (1653).
When I worked on the polio vaccine, I had a theory. Experiments were done to determine what might or might not occur. I guided each one by imagining myself in the phenomenon in which I was interested. The intuitive realm is constantly active—the realm of imagination guides my thinking.
From interview with James Reston, Jr., in Pamela Weintraub (ed.), The Omni Interviews (1984), 98. Previously published in magazine, Omni (May 1982).
When the pioneer in science sets forth the groping feelers of his thought, he must have a vivid, intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by an artistically creative imagination.
In Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1968), 109.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
