This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The existence of a God, reason clearly makes known to us, as has been shown. The knowledge of existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connection of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history." - John Locke
"I believe that being true to the self is the most important thing in life - to have a free heart, a pure soul and a pure mind. We all live, or should live, for the fulfillment of the self. We are all mirror images of each other; whatever we feel in ourselves we feel in others. I believe that we create our own lives... Intuition should play the main role in everything we do. Through the creative source of the mind and the unlimited power of the spirit all our deepest wishes come true. For me the meaning is that we are all one, and the only true reality is the spirit. Believing in the power of spirit is simply to have a passion for life, to learn, to grow, to evolve and most of all to love, and live each day and each moment of the day to the fullest." - Tatjana Patitz
"Knowledge has three degrees: opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known." - Plotinus NULL
"For there are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely, by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience; since many have the arguments relating to what can be known, but because they lack experience they neglect the arguments, and neither avoid what is harmful nor follow what is good. For if a man who has never seen fire should prove by adequate reasoning that fire burns and injures things and destroys them, his mind would not be satisfied thereby, nor would he avoid fire, until he placed his hand or some combustible substance in the fire, so that he might prove by experience that which reasoning taught. But when he has had actual experience of combustion his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore reasoning does not suffice, but experience does. " - Roger Bacon, scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis meaning "Wonderful Teacher"
"Intuition precedes all creation." - Hayim Nahim Bialik, also Chaim or Haim
"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why. All great discoveries are made in this way." - Albert Einstein
"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"I don’t see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, I.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perceptions will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in the future." - Kurt Gödel, also Goedel
"Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original." - Plotinus NULL
"Useful knowledge is a great support for intuition." - Charles B. Rogers
"When intuition is developed, it should lead the way into the unknown, with slower-moving reason following behind, evaluating the appropriateness of intuitive insights and inspirations along the way. Thus intuition might inspire us to embark on a new path through life, but rationality can help us with everyday decision-making as we struggle to manifest our vision." - Frances E. Vaughan
"A highly evolved use of intuition is being able to find meaning in symbols and synchronicities. The more we focus on finding meaning for ourselves in “chance occurrences,” the more we increase our intuitive power. Deepening our connection to our current surrounding increases our ability to follow the guidance of our inner purpose." - Carol Adrienne
"To strengthen your intuitive ability, you need to become more sensitive to body signals such as stiff necks (which usually indicates your are locked into a power struggle and/or feel overwhelmed by too much to do), headaches, stomachaches, or sleeplessness… Intuition seems to come unbidden from external events… Slowing down and doing less is great for increasing your intuition." - Carol Adrienne
"Purpose is about developing relationships. Purpose is about bringing attention and intention into the present moment, moving ahead with new ideas, giving and receiving support, volunteering, mentoring, listening to the imagination and intuition, communicating, taking action based on inner direction and hints from the external, being adaptable, taking responsibility and ending the victim stance forever surrendering to the divine will and working with the lessons developing fluidity, tolerance, compassion, and the ability to love." - Carol Adrienne
"Whenever the hidden, the unfathomable, is experienced whenever the meaning of all things is felt and grasped, then it is ether the devoutness of silence, that most intimate feeling of the living God, that deepest force of religious intuition and emotion, which takes hold of man, or, again, it is the uplift to imagery which is stirred up within him, the poetry which sings in prayer of the ineffable." - Leo Baeck
"The free man acts morally because he has a moral idea. He does not act in order that morality may come into being. A moral idea, born of intuition without compulsion, inner or outer, would be at one and the same time the highest motive and the highest driving force in man." - L. Francis Edmunds
"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why." - Albert Einstein
"We need to be willing to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly." - Shakti Gawain
"That which is `provable’ is not Reality but perception or mentation only. Reality is subjective and knowable only by virtue of identity with the known. “Provables’ belong to the classification and level of limitation and are arbitrary abstractions whose sole `reality’ is merely the consequence of selection and identification. The phenomenal is not the same as the noumenal [understood by intellectual intuition without the aid of the senses – opposed to phenomenon.]" - David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
"Faith is sensitiveness to what transcends nature, knowledge and will, awareness of the ultimate, alertness to the holy dimension of all reality. Faith is a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason and its nature cannot be defined in abstract, static terms. To have faith is not to infer the beyond from the wretched here, but to perceive the wonder that is here and to be stirred by the desire to integrate the self into the holy order of living. It is not a deduction but an intuition, not a form of knowledge, of being convinced without proof, but the attitude of mind toward ideas whose scope is wider than its own capacity to grasp." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Intuition [is] perception via the unconscious." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"In ourselves we harbor the intuition of another evolution, of other possibilities of life." - Abellatif Laâbi
"Truth, not in distinct and clear-cut definitions but in the limpid obscurity of a single intuition that unites all dogmas in one simple Light, shining into the soul directly from God’s eternity, without the medium of created concept, without the intervention of symbols or of language or the likeness of material things. Here the Truth is One Whom we not only know and possess but by Whom we are known and possessed. Here theology ceases to be a body of abstractions and becomes a Living Reality Who is God Himself." - Thomas Merton
"Our brains create a holistic image of the world by putting all the pieces together to create something greater than the parts. Intuition allows us to comprehend what the senses cannot perceive." - Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
"Truth is like light: visible in itself, not distinguished by the shadows that it casts. There is something in our souls of God, which corresponds with what is of God outside us, and recognizes it by direct intuition: something in the true soul which corresponds with truth and knows it to be truth." -
"If man is not one with the Eternal in the unity of intuition and feeling which is immediate, he remains, in the unity of consciousness which is derived, for ever apart." - Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher
"There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience." -
"Unlike Easterners, who are given to meditation, or Westerners, who have an inquisitive turn of mind, we of Africa, belonging neither to the East nor the West, are fundamentally observers, relying more on intuition than on the process of reasoning ... With us, life has always meant the pursuit of Happiness rather than the pursuit of Beauty or Truth." - Dunduza K. Chisiza
"Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful; yourself." - Alan Alda, born Alphonso Joseph D'Abruzzo
"Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful; yourself." -
"Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful; yourself." -
"Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer to the last appeal of what is right lies within a person's own breast. Trust thyself." - Aristotle NULL
"The religious concentration of the soul appears in the form of feeling; it nevertheless passes also into reflection; a form of worship is a result of reflection. The second form of the union of the objective and subjective in the human spirit is art. This advances farther into the realm of the actual and sensuous than religion. In its nobles walk it is occupied with representing, not indeed, the spirit of God, but certainly the form of God; and in its secondary aims, that which is divine and spiritual generally. Its office is to render visible the divine; presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty. but the true is the object not only of conception and feeling, as in religion - and of intuition, as in art - but also of the thinking faculty; and this gives us the third form of the union in question - philosophy." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Intuition represents the free life of the mind, the poetry native to it, which I am far from despising; but this is the subjective or ideal element in thought which we must discount if we are anxious to possess true knowledge." - George Santayana
"Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition." - George Santayana
"Fear is static that prevents me from hearing my intuition." - Hugh Prather
"All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason, beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought." - Immanuel Kant
"Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit. How sad it would be, I thought, if we humans ultimately were to lose all sense of mystery, all sense of awe, if our left brains were utterly to dominate the right so that logic and reason triumphed over intuition and alienated us absolutely from our innermost being, from our hearts, from our souls." - Jane Goodall, fully Dame Jane Morris Goodall, born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall
"Logic, which alone can give certainty, is the instrument of demonstration; intuition is the instrument of invention." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. Every great discover contains an irrational element or a creative intuition." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"Every discovery contains an "irrational element" or creative intuition." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"Intuition is your link to the divine. And to stay in touch with your intuition, you must know, and respect, the limits of your mental energy. Life happens too fast for your ever to think about it all. If people could just be persuaded of this, but they insist on amassing information." - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"This, therefore, is a law not found in books, but written on the fleshy tablets of the heart, which we have not learned from man, received or read, but which we have caught up from Nature herself, sucked in and imbibed; taught, but for which we were made; we received it not by education, but by intuition." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The key to the art of listening is selectivity... Listen critically. Mentally challenge assertions, ideas, philosophies. Seek the truth with an open mind. Listen with your heart... Listen for growth. Be an inquisitive listener. Listen creatively... Listen to yourself. Listen to your deepest yearnings, your highest aspirations, your noblest impulses. Listen to the better man within you. Listen with depth. Be still and meditate. Listen with the ear of intuition for the inspiration of the Infinite." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson