Michael Polanyi Quotes

Michael Polanyi on God

• “The correct reading of ⊢ {\displaystyle \vdash } p written down by me in good faith is therefore 'I believe p ', or some other words expressing the same fiduciary act.”

  p. 28

Michael Polanyi on Happiness

• “In a strict usage the same symbol should never represent the act of sincerely asserting something and the content of what is asserted. For the symbolic distinction between the two, Frege has introduced the 'signpost' symbol. ... ⊢ {\displaystyle \vdash } p is to signify the actual assertion of p , while the bare symbol p must henceforth be used only as part of a sentence. ... It should be clear from the modality of a sentence whether it is a question, a command, an invective, a complaint or an allegation of fact.”

  p. 27

Michael Polanyi on Knowledge

• Attributed to Michael Polanyi:

  “We can know more than we can tell.”

• “All knowledge is personal.”

  p. 17

• Attributed to Michael Polanyi:

  “Tacit knowing is the foundation of explicit knowing.”

• Attributed to Michael Polanyi:

  “Discovery is the act of guessing reality.”

• Attributed to Michael Polanyi:

  “Pure objectivity is a myth that, if accepted, destroys what it sought to perfect.”

• “When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative — subject only to the laws which uniformly apply to all of them — we have a system of spontaneous order in society.”

  Wikiquote

• “The term ' simplicity ' functions then merely as a disguise for another meaning than its own. It is used for smuggling an essential quality into our appreciation of a scientific theory, which a mistaken conception of objectivity forbids us to openly acknowledge.”

  p. 16

• “No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.”

  p. 27

• “Whitehead and Russell ... translate ⊢ {\displaystyle \vdash } p imples q into the words 'it is asserted that p implies q '. But the phrase 'it is asserted' suggests an impersonal happening of assertions: 'it is asserted' as 'it is raining' or 'it happens'. The value of the assertion sign is lost if we allow ourselves to revert in our verbal translation of it to the muddle of a declaratory sentence which asserts itself or is impersonally asserted by nobody in particular.”

  p. 28

• “A declaratory sentence can be asserted, because it is an incomplete symbol, of indeterminate modality; while a question, a command, an invective, or any other sentence of fixed intention can no more be asserted than could my act of hewing wood or of drinking tea.”

  p. 28

Read all Michael Polanyi quotes on Knowledge

Michael Polanyi on Life

• “The recognition of certain basic impossibilities has laid the foundations of some major principles of physics and chemistry ; similarly, recognition of the impossibility of understanding living things in terms of physics and chemistry, far from setting limits to our understanding of life, will guide it in the right direction. And even if the demonstration of this impossibility should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery, such a demonstration would help to draw a truer image of life and man than that given us by the present basic concepts of biology.”

  Wikiquote

Michael Polanyi on Nature

• “The confidence placed in physical theory owes much to its possessing the same kind of excellence from which pure geometry and pure mathematics in general derive their interest, and for the sake of which they are cultivated. ... We cannot truly account for our acceptance of such theories without endorsing our acknowledgement of a beauty that exhilarates and a profundity that entrances us.”

  p. 15

• “While the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these.”

  p. 53