Michael Polanyi Quotes

Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.

Having knowledge but lacking the power to express it clearly is no better than never having any ideas at all.

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.

While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.

Conversation is the laboratory and workshop of the student.

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.

Words are not brains, you know.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought

Learning comes from education, while knowing comes from revelation. Learning is cognitive, while knowing is spiritual.

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.

You should know better.ʺ ʺIʹve never known better,ʺ he countered. ʺYou should know that.

If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

MIND, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavour to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it has nothing but itself to know itself with.

The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.

We have no evidence as yet about mind or the power to think; it seems to be a widely different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers.

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.