Michael Polanyi Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

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

Michael Polanyi
Discoveries made by the surprising configuration of existing theories might in fact be likened to the feat of a Columbus whose genius lay in taking literally and as a guide to action that the earth was round, which his contemporaries held vaguely and as a mere matter for speculation.

Michael Polanyi
The amount of knowledge which we can justify from evidence directly available to us can never be large. The overwhelming proportion of our factual beliefs continue therefore to be held at second hand through trusting others, and in the great majority of cases our trust is placed in the authority of comparatively few people of widely acknowledged standing.

Michael Polanyi
Discovery comes only to a mind immersed in its pursuit. For such work the scientist needs a secluded place among like-minded colleagues who keenly share his aims and sharply control his performances. The soil of academic science must be exterritorial in order to secure its rule by scientific opinion.

Michael Polanyi
One of the greatest and most surprising discoveries of our own age, that of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals (in 1912) was made by a mathematician, Max von Laue, by the sheer power of believing more concretely than anyone else in the accepted theory of crystals and X-rays.

Michael Polanyi
The existence of animals was not discovered by zoologists, nor that of plants by botanists, and the scientific value of zoology and botany is but an extension of man's pre-scientific interests in animals and plants.

Michael Polanyi
But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.

Michael Polanyi
While applied mathematics is object-directed, pure mathematics has no outside object; being concerned with objects of its own creation, it may be described as "object creating."

Michael Polanyi
The universe is still dead, but it already has the capacity of coming to life.

Michael Polanyi
A free society is regarded as one that does not engage, on principle, in attempting to control what people find meaningful, and a totalitarian society is regarded as one that does, on principle, attempt such control.

Michael Polanyi
An art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost.... It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts — equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics —to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than two hundred years ago.

Michael Polanyi
All these difficulties are but consequences of our refusal to see that mathematics cannot be defined without acknowledging its most obvious feature: namely, that it is interesting.

Michael Polanyi
Nowhere is intellectual beauty so deeply felt and fastidiously appreciated in its various grades and qualities as in mathematics, and only the informal appreciation of mathematical value can distinguish what is mathematics from a welter of formally similar, yet altogether trivial statements and operations.

Michael Polanyi
The first thing to make clear is that scientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization.

Michael Polanyi
Now, I am not suggesting that it is impossible to find natural laws; but only that this is not done, and cannot be done, by applying some explicitly known operation.

Michael Polanyi
Discoveries are made by pursuing possibilities suggested by existing knowledge.

Michael Polanyi
Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

Michael Polanyi
Modern mathematics can be kept alive only by a large number of mathematicians cultivating different parts of the same system of values: a community which can be kept coherent only by the passionate vigilance of universities, journals and meetings, fostering these values and imposing the same respect for them on all mathematicians.

Michael Polanyi
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.... 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.

Michael Polanyi
Our view of life must account for how we know life; biological theories must allow for their own discovery and employment. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. Beginning with our own embodiment our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends.

Michael Polanyi
The correct reading of p written down by me in good faith is therefore 'I believe p', or some other words expressing the same fiduciary act.

Michael Polanyi
The descriptive sciences rely on skill and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards.

Michael Polanyi
We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them because we are looking with them.

Michael Polanyi
To learn by example is to submit to authority.... By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.... Common Law... is the most important system of strictly traditional activities.

Michael Polanyi
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.

Michael Polanyi
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.

Michael Polanyi
Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge. Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous. Only affirmations that could be false can be said to convey objective knowledge of this kind.

Michael Polanyi
To try to reform all the power structures at once would leave us with no power structure to use in our project. In any case, we will be able to see that absolute moral renewal could be attempted only by an absolute power and that a tyrannous force such as this must destroy the whole moral life of man, not renew it.

Michael Polanyi
We do not accept a religion because it offers us certain rewards. The only thing that a religion can offer us is to be just what it, in itself, is: a greater meaning in ourselves, in our lives, and in our grasp of the nature of things...a religion exists for us only if, like a piece of poetry, it carries us away. It is not in any sense a 'hypothesis.

Michael Polanyi
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.

Michael Polanyi