Michael Polanyi Quotes

You see, Kenny, there are some things you don't even know you know, until you're asked.

You know more than you know.

Everybody always knows something," said Adam, "even if it's something they don't know they know.

I'm constantly surprised by... an orange will roll off a table, and I'll catch it before I knew it was falling. Something happens there. We could write it off and say, 'Subconsciously I knew that was happening,' but there's so many things every day - I'm amazed by how little we know.

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.

You will never be as smart as your subconscious.

I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

We understand more than we know.

I do a lot of things intuitively. I'm not often consciously aware of what I'm doing. It's like in a dream: There's something going on that's powerful but you don't know exactly why.

Intuition does not in itself amount to knowledge, yet cannot be disregarded by philosophers and psychologists.

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level.

Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.

What you know about the people whom you know at all well is truly amazing, even though you have never formulated it.

What you don’t know can be your greatest asset.

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious

Hunches are a kind of subterranean logic shorthand.

...to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know

I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.

I didn't know what I knew. I wasn't aware of what I knew.

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.

The truth is silent. The truth doesn't come with words. It's something that I just know; it's something that I can feel without words, and it's called silent knowledge.

We all know what we're doing. Whether we realize it or not.

If there's something you know and there's something you feel, but you can't quite express it, you will hear it somewhere. And you don't have to worry, because someone will get it sung out.

I don't understand what I do, I just know that it's great.

If a man has to say trust me, Gogu conveyed, it's a sure sign you cannot. Trust him, that is. Trust is a thing you know without words.