Quotations about Intuition and Instincts
Intuition is a faculty of the soul, just as reliable as that of Reason... ~R.H. Brown, "It Is All Clairvoyance!" in The Spiritual Magazine, October 1868
Trust Yourself... You know more than you think you do. ~Benjamin Spock, M.D., The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, 1946
We are indeed wiser than we know. Our
...intuition is your soul's perception... ~Compton Mackenzie, The Altar Steps, "Chapter XIV: St. Mark's Day," 1922
Instinct is untaught ability. ~Alexander Bain
The chill of some vague fear was upon him. ~Bram Stoker, The Man, 1905
The inward light is forever striving to gather enough additional light to penetrate the fog of our senses. ~Henry Stanley Haskins, "Metapsychics," Meditations in Wall Street, 1940
Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way. ~Florence Scovel Shinn, "Intuition or Guidance," The Game of Life and How to Play It, 1925
Instinct selects the best method first, reason last. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way,
While meaner things, whom instinct leads,
Are rarely known to stray...
~William Cowper, "The Doves"
Intuition... is innate, or integral. Education may develop, but it can not create, this faculty. It rises from beneath, like the sun, and, like it, shines over the horizon of Reason. Its divine impulses are as rays from distant constellations.... I affirm that pure Intuition is higher than hope, and far greater than belief... ~Andrew Jackson Davis, The Great Harmonia: Being a Progressive Revelation of the Eternal Principles Which Inspire Mind and Govern Matter, Volume V: The Thinker, Part III: The Origin of Life and The Law of Immortality, "Intuition as an Evidence of Immortality," 1859
Man will have replicated his own intelligence not when he teaches a computer to reason but when he teaches a computer to have a nagging feeling in its circuits. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Human commandments stifle so many a true and healthy instinct. Duty, they say. Honour, they say... One little law might serve instead of all the rest: that we be faithful to the instinct in ourselves. ~Barbra Ring, Før kulden kommer, 1915, translated from the Norwegian by
Intuition is instinct humanized. ~F. B. Dowd, The Temple of the Rosy Cross: The Soul: Its Powers, Migrations and Transmigrations, "Chapter VIII: Attributes of Mind," 1882
Instincts outsmart brains. ~Terri Guillemets
The sense of subtile feeling often outwits reason in its unerring measurement of truth. ~James Lendall Basford (1845–1915), Seven Seventy Seven Sensations, 1897
One of the great — but largely unacknowledged — sources of human wisdom is the simple, lowly, bullshit detector. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
I suspect we have internal senses. The mind's eye since Shakespeare's time has been proverbial; and we have also a mind's ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them: the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing any thing. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827