Michael Polanyi - Art Quotes

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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

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