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Intuitive   Listen
adjective
Intuitive  adj.  
1.
Seeing clearly; as, an intuitive view; intuitive vision.
2.
Knowing, or perceiving, by intuition; capable of knowing without deduction or reasoning. "Whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive, or intuitive."
3.
Received, reached, obtained, or perceived, by intuition; as, intuitive judgment or knowledge; opposed to deductive.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Intuitive" Quotes from Famous Books



... in these it is usually most marked. In this I am confirmed by Q., who writes: "In all, or certainly almost all, the cases of congenital male inverts (excluding psycho-sexual hermaphrodites) that I know there has been a remarkable sensitiveness and delicacy of sentiment, sympathy, and an intuitive habit of mind, such as we generally associate with the feminine sex, even though the body might be quite masculine in its form and habit."[206] When, however, a distinguished invert said to Moll: "We are all women; ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... odd, Mr. Vibart, that I should take you into my confidence in this way after so short an acquaintance, but somehow I can't help regarding you as a friend already. I believe in those intuitive sympathies, don't you? They have never misled me—" her lids drooped retrospectively—"and besides, I always tell Mr. Carstyle that on this point I will have no false pretences. Where truth is concerned I am inexorable, and I consider it my duty to let our friends know that ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... will affect their crops. The tints of the clouds that float above them convey a meaning. There are cause and effect in the wind that continues in one direction. They watch the actions of wild animals and fowls, and they are wise enough to attribute to beast and bird an intuitive protective sense superior to their own. They note when the moss has grown heavier on the north side ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan

... controversy raged between scientists and theologians in the middle of the nineteenth century, and later. The evolutionary truths were not at first well understood. They seemed to question or deny the existence of God. Deep within humanity is intuitive religious belief. It is a natural faith that transcends all facts, like the faith of a child in its mother. Because evolution was contrary to all preconceived ideas of the earth's inception it seemed at first to shatter faith and destroy ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... infinite Discovery and so disturb its delicate equilibrium. Its balance was precarious. Once an Authority got wind of anything, the Extra Day might change its course and sail into another port. Aunt Emily, even from a distance...! In any case, they behaved with this intuitive sagacity which obviated ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... noblest daughter of the Pharaohs. The grand primary problem of how to isolate her from all contact with the outside world was, under the existing circumstances, easy of solution. Beyond this there needed little positive treatment. Her creed must arise from her own instinctive and intuitive impressions. Of all beyond the reach of her hands, she trust to her eyes alone for information; no marvel, therefore, if her conclusions concerning the great intangible phenomena of the universe were fantastic as the veriest heathen myths. The self-evolved feelings and ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... beautiful in the extreme, but whom tattered garments, raven hair (which fell in matted elf-locks over her naked shoulders), swarthy complexion, and flashing eyes, proclaimed to be of the wandering tribe of 'gitanos.' From an intuitive sense of natural politeness she stood with crossed arms, and a slight smile on her dark and handsome countenance, until my companion had ceased, and then addressed us in the usual whining tone of supplication, with 'Caballeritos, una limosita! Dios se lo pagara a ustedes!' ('Gentlemen, a little charity! ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... recognised or understood when the excellence of the manufacture was greatest, believing that Violin makers of the order of Stradivari must be like poets, "born artificers, not made." The chief merits of Stradivari and his contemporary makers were intuitive. Their rules, having their origin in experience, were applied as dictated by their marvellous sense of touch and cunning, with results infinitely superior to any obtained with the aid of the most approved mechanical contrivances. When to these considerations we add ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart

... lieutenant and his crew clearing all before them with a valiant cheer, which Snowball re-echoed with a terrific shout like an Indian war-cry, perhaps from some intuitive recollections of his native wilds on the banks of the Congo, in which the words "golly, take dat now!" could, however, be plainly distinguished—the attack proved a trifle too hot for the mongrel lot of scoundrels whom the pirate captain, or cut-throat, commanded; and ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... reason for disliking him; then, in case that adventurer, as she now called him, married Celeste, the fear of her authority being lessened gave her a species of second-sight; she had ended by having an intuitive sense of the dark profundities of the man's nature, and now declared that under no circumstances and for no possible price would she make ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... to hide from Sigmund that some great grief threatened, or had already descended upon his father, and therefore upon him. The child's sympathy with the man's nature, with every mood and feeling—I had almost said his intuitive understanding of his father's very thoughts, was too keen and intense to be hoodwinked or turned aside. He did not behave like other children, of course—versteht sich, as Eugen said to me with a dreary smile. He did ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... mingling an element of real liking for the man with one's unfailing admiration of his remarkable ability. But always when you feel like that cordial handshake and talking to him with brusque familiarity, there is the intuitive feeling that one of the two, perhaps both, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... for the rest of the year. That long, silent period cannot, so far as sounds go, be a receptive one; the song early in life has become crystallized in the form it will keep through life, and is like an intuitive act. This is not the case with birds like the starling, that sing all the year round—birds that are naturally loquacious and sing instead of screaming and chirping like others. They are always borrowing new ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... to the powers that come with the higher awakening, have been dealt with somewhat fully, to show that the matters along the lines of man's interior, intuitive, spiritual, thought, soul life, instead of being, as they are so many times regarded, merely indefinite, sentimental, or impractical, are, on the contrary, powerfully, omnipotently real, and are of ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... mind the exact problem to be solved, yet the keenness with which he detected in imperfect material the real solution is often marvellous. Again and again the later student finds but little more to do than to prove more fully and from a wider range of material the intuitive conclusions ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... gotter be a-goin' 'bout day arter ter-morrer," and the dog wagged sleepy assent. But next morning when Steve wakened a peculiar stillness smote him. Tige was usually alert at his least move. With intuitive alarm Steve put out his hand,—and touched a rigid body! Drawing back he sprang to his feet, a cry of ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins

... muffled stillness of the house the sound of the opening front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in and stop for a minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower hail. Then she heard his footsteps move to the staircase; and while she listened she had a curious intuitive sense that it was not George at all, but a stranger who was coming to her, and that this stranger walked like a very old man. She heard him reach the bend in the stairs, and without stopping to put out the light, pass on to her ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... temper, his most charitable disposition, a vigorous condition of soul-life, a sensible care of the temporal body, and also the continued desire to be always walking with God, as well as the desire for larger acquisitions of intuitive spiritual knowledge—very proper things to take into the House of God with you at all times; and our departed brother had enough of these, ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... the better day of which I dreamed; and only indirectly to those with whom I was appointed to serve, but who could not or would not catch the vision of my dreams. An irreconcilable conflict was here being joined—the old, old conflict between a dead and a living fellowship. It was my intuitive, although unconscious knowledge of this fact, which made me a rebel in every Unitarian gathering of the last ten years. It was a similarly unconscious instinct of self-preservation which taught my Unitarian brethren, to whom the old association was still central, to resent ...
— A Statement: On the Future of This Church • John Haynes Holmes

... blue scarf and sash around throat and waist. Her face, though showing signs of quiet strength, and of a self-confidence which was the flower of maidenly modesty and innocence, was not beautiful according to any recognized standard. Bressant, from his intuitive perception of form and proportion, was aware of this. The forehead was too high, the nose irregular, the mouth lacked the perfect curve, and the teeth, though white and even, were ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... Bluntschli with an intuitive guess at his state of mind). I daresay you think us a couple of ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw

... became the starting-point of a theology which is nascent in the Wisdom literature of the Bible. Theology is the reasoning about God which follows always in the footsteps of religious certitude. First, man by his intuitive reason rises to some idea of the Godhead satisfying to his emotion; next, by his discursive reason, he endeavors to justify that idea to his experience in analyzing God's operations. Renan, disposing sweepingly of a great question, declares that the Jewish monotheism excluded any true theology. ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... essayed the right-hand entrance only to turn back as though warned by some strange intuitive sense that this was not the way. At last, convinced by the oft-recurring phenomenon, I cast my all upon the left-hand archway; yet it was with a lingering doubt that I turned a parting look at the sullen waters which rolled, dark ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... mental quality in him. Her eyes travelled reflectively to the lean, square-jawed face, with its sensitive, bitter-looking mouth and its fine modeling of brow and temple, as though seeking there the answer to her questionings, and with a sudden, intuitive instinct of reliance, she felt that behind all his cynicism and surface hardness, there lay a quiet, sure strength of soul that would not ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... Bessie Fairfax had disconcerted this fine gentleman, but now the tables were turned, and on board the yacht he often disconcerted her—not of malice prepense, but for want of due consideration. No doubt she was a little unformed, ignorant girl, but her intuitive perceptions were quick, and she knew when she was depreciated and misunderstood. On a certain afternoon he read her some beautiful poetry under the awning, and was interested to know whether she had any taste for poetry. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... do well to repeat to the parents faithfully and truly the defects they observe in the dispositions of very young children. If properly checked in time, evil propensities may be eradicated; but this should not extend to anything but serious defects; otherwise, the intuitive perceptions which all children possess will construe the act into "spying" and "informing," which should never be resorted to in the case of children, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... the work of a man so eminently gifted as Grundtvig is explainable only by his method of writing. He was an intuitive writer and preferred to be called a "skjald" instead of a poet. The distinction is significant but somewhat difficult to define. As Grundtvig himself understood the term, the "skjald", besides being a poet, must also be a seer, a man able to envision and express what ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg

... living, it was said, the mind was endued with ampler and more exalted faculties than it otherwise possessed; partook more fully of the nature of the One Universal Soul, was gifted with prophetic inspiration, and a kind of intuitive perception of secret things.[340] This power, derived from the favour of the celestial deities, who were led to distinguish the virtuous and high-minded, was quite distinct from magic, an infamous, uncertain, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... look! It seems absurd that you are a married woman. Why, you haven't your full growth yet." And on an impulse of intuitive sympathy Mrs. Fanshaw pressed her arm, and Pauline was suddenly filled with gratitude, and liked ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips

... it is before all things useful to perfect the understanding or reason, as far as we can, and in this alone man's highest happiness or blessedness consists, indeed blessedness is nothing else but the contentment of spirit, which arises from the intuitive knowledge of God: now, to perfect the understanding is nothing else but to understand God, God's attributes, and the actions which follow from the necessity of his nature. Wherefore of a man, who is led by reason, the ultimate aim or highest desire, whereby he seeks ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza

... the same home in which Rose boarded, and for the rest of the winter she and Martin went on as before—working as hard as ever and making money even faster, while peace settled over their household, a peace so profound that, in her more intuitive moments, Bill's mother felt ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius

... is equally true that it is very easily learned. Although as illimitable in its applications as the infinite relations of men to each other, it is, nevertheless, made up of simple elementary principles, of the truth and justice of which every ordinary mind has an almost intuitive perception. It is the science of justice, and almost all men have the same perceptions of what constitutes justice, or of what justice requires, when they understand alike the facts from which their inferences are to be drawn. ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... not always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come uncalled into ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge

... That wisdom, that intuitive, divining power is starlike, says the commentator, because it shines with its own light, because it rises on high, and illumines all things. Nought is hid from it, whether things past, things present, or things to come; for it is beyond the threefold form of time, so that all things are ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston

... commiserating air that was remarkable by its contrast with the frigid ceremonious politeness with which she attended her mistress. It had not escaped Mrs. Rylands, however, who ever since Jack's abrupt departure had noticed this change in the girl's demeanor to herself, and with a woman's intuitive insight of another woman, had fathomed it. The comfortable tete-a-tete with Jack, which Jane had looked forward to, Mrs. Rylands had anticipated herself, and then sent him off! When Joshua thanked his wife for remembering the pepper-sauce, and ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... those smiles which were answered by smiles of the most tender softness, had not rather given you the idea of those happy celestial spirits, whose nature is love, and who are not obliged to have recourse to words for the expression of that intuitive sentiment. In the mean time, Madame de la Tour, perceiving every day some unfolding grace, some new beauty, in her daughter, felt her maternal anxiety increase with her tenderness. She often said to me, 'If I should die, what will ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre

... recoil of virtue away from vice," said Jasper Very. "God has given to woman an intuitive sense which, without any long process of reasoning, shows her when a man is bad. It is her protection against his greater strength. It is the Almighty's gift to her, and is beyond the value of rubies. If she will use it, she need never be deceived as to ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick

... debarred their champion from the possibility of first scoring the eleventh point, which chance was his by right, it being his turn to play; they met the argument caviling at Otasite's lack of aim by the counter-argument that one does not aim at a moving object where it is at the moment, but with an intuitive calculation of distance and speed where it will be when reached by the projectile hurled after it, illustrating cleverly by the example of shooting with bow and arrow at ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... this same intuitive loyalty to her Business of Being a Woman, her unwillingness to have it tampered with, that is to-day the great obstacle to our Uneasy Woman putting her program of relief into force. And it is the effort to move this mass which she derides as inert that leads to much of the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator's brain. The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... he differs in the same way from the young of both sexes. Can this law be applied in the case in which the adult female possesses characters not possessed by the male: for instance, the high degree of intuitive power of reading the mental states of others and of concealing her own—characters which Mr. Spencer shows to be accounted for by the relations between the husband and wife in a state of savagery. If so, the man should resemble "the young of both sexes" in the absence of these ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... earth into harmony with the life and law of the universe (Tao). This was also Confucius's purpose. But while Confucius set out to attain that purpose in a sort of primitive scientific way, by laying down a number of rules of human conduct, Lao Tzu tries to attain his ideal by an intuitive, emotional method. Lao Tzu is always described as a mystic, but perhaps this is not entirely appropriate; it must be borne in mind that in his time the Chinese language, spoken and written, still had great difficulties in ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... rule, these artistic prodigies do not represent the union of variations which we find in the greatest genius. Such men are often distinctly lacking in power of sustained constructive thought. Their insight is largely what is called intuitive. They have flashes of emotional experience which crystallize into single creations of art. They depend upon "inspiration"—a word which is responsible for much of the overrating of such men, and for a good many ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... child of his parents, was born. His mother died in his childhood, so he really never had any vivid recollection of her, but hearsay, fused with memory and ideality, vitalized all. And thus to him, to the day of his death, his mother stood for gentleness, patience, tenderness, intuitive insight, and a love that never grew faint. Man makes his mother in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard

... them with so much feeling, to notice the approach of a slight female figure, beautiful in the extreme, but whose tattered garments, raven hair, swarthy complexion and flashing eyes proclaimed to be of the wandering tribe of Gitanos. From an intuitive sense of politeness, she stood with crossed arms and a slight smile on her dark and handsome countenance until my companion had ceased, and then addressed us in the usual whining tone of supplication— 'Caballeritos, una limosnita! ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... their hair, and a half-dozen were in gowns which were obviously intended for dancing and nothing else. But none of them were in decollete gowns. A few wore gloves. They had copied the fashions of their richer sisters with the intuitive taste of the American girl of their class, and they waltzed quite as well as the ladies whose dresses they copied, and many of them were exceedingly pretty. The costumes of the gentlemen varied from the clothes they wore nightly when waiting on the table, to cutaway coats with ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... his preparations. This time Silver did not suspect his purpose. She had passed out of the quick, intuitive watchfulness of childhood. During these days she had taken up the habit of sitting by herself in the flower-room, ostensibly with her book or sewing; but when they glanced in through the open door, her hands were lying idle on her lap ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... us turn our attention to the left-hand corner. There we see that pithy soldier all in red. Rembrandt, with his intuitive knowledge of chiaroscuro, was not afraid of painting a figure all in red. He knew that the play of light and shade on the colour would help him out. Here part of the red is toned down by a beautiful soft tint, which makes the ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels

... which, they say, the mind is passive, a distinct active process called perception, which is the direct recognition of an external object, as the cause of the sensation. Probably, perceptions are simply cases of belief claiming to be intuitive, i.e. free of external evidence. But, at any rate, any question as to their nature is irrelevant to an inquiry like the present, viz. how we get the non-original part of our knowledge. And so also is the distinction in German metaphysics, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing

... not at our command? This may be done by what we may call visions, whereby the images of things absent are so represented to the mind that we seem to see them with our eyes and have them present before us. Whoever can work up his imagination to an intuitive view of this kind, will be very successful ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser

... among the rushes where I thought the marshy ground would bear me, and while I was there three swans came. Something in their manner of flying seemed to say to me, 'Look carefully now; there is one not all swan, only swan's feathers.' You know, mother, you have the same intuitive feeling that I have; you know whether a thing ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... philosophical and mystical Christians throws much light on that wonderful history of the Magdalene that has so touched the heart of Christendom. For instance, in the Pistis-Sophia, the chief of all the disciples, the most spiritual and intuitive, is Mary Magdalene. This is not without significance when we remember the love of the Christ for Mary "out of whom he ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... table her eyes sought his in appeal; his answered hers with intuitive comprehension. But his mind was stunned with apprehension at the discovery that her passion for this man meant so much that his hate would be a lighter burden than ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... to observe, that I do not speak here of ethics as an abstract science, but simply as it relates to practice, and the oeconomy of human life. Our enquiry therefore is respecting the time at which that intuitive faculty is generally awakened, by which we decide upon the differences of virtue and vice, and are impelled to applaud the one, and ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin

... human forces which he himself had demonstrated artistically in his great poem. "I must confess," he writes to Roeckel, "to having arrived at a clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions corresponding to my intuitive principles." ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw

... watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he could be spoken to he ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... with him in their earlier interviews, she could scarcely have told why; but there was an intuitive feeling that he was not one to be trusted. That, however, gradually gave way under the fascinations of his fine person, agreeable manners, and intellectual conversation. He was very plausible and captivating, she ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley

... the knowledge from close discrimination of the behavior of the plant. Often they are themselves unconscious of this knack of knowing what will make the plant to thrive; but it is not at all necessary to have such an intuitive judgment to enable one to be even more than a fairly good gardener. Diligent attention to the plant's habits and requirements, and a real regard for the plant's welfare, will make any person ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey

... she generally read the characters of artifice and insincerity with intuitive quickness, though it was often believed she was duped by those whom she saw through completely. Of this she was aware, but she was so exempt from all desire to prove her sagacity, that she never cared ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... the captain with a grin. Almost before the words had left his lips, Phil took a rapid aim and fired. At the same identical moment the crocodile shut his jaws with a snap, as if he had an intuitive perception that something uneatable was coming. The bullet consequently hit his forehead, off which it glanced as if it had struck a plate of cast-iron. The reptile gave a wabble, expressive of lazy surprise, and sank slowly back ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the intuitive. Logic takes time. Persis never attempted to account for the unreasoning certainty which on occasion took command of her actions. It was impossible for her to recognize Diantha's companion or to know indeed, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... quickly to the same place, and, as we caught sight of the gallant sailors, who, though strangers to us, seemed each to possess the features of dear and long-lost friends, our feelings could scarcely be restrained. An intuitive feeling that we might, by some rash movement, lose the heavenly chance just opening to our view, kept us in iron bounds. As it was, a sort of hub-bub did ensue, they not understanding who we were, and we caring for nothing on this near approach of delivery. ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton

... in my sister's lap. But any kind of a meeting was a temptation not to be resisted in that little community. Adin Ballou was in full sympathy with all the other reformers and transcendentalists of the Commonwealth, and when I search myself for an explanation of my early and intuitive attraction to their ideals I sometimes fancy they must have visited me in my sleep in that old hall; or perhaps I heard something which lay like a seed in the unconscious, secret recesses of my being until time and favoring ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... recognize an expression as a tautology, in cases where no generality-sign occurs in it, one can employ the following intuitive method: instead of 'p', 'q', 'r', etc. I write 'TpF', 'TqF', 'TrF', etc. Truth-combinations I express by means of brackets, e.g. and I use lines to express the correlation of the truth or falsity of the whole proposition with the truth-combinations of its truth-arguments, in the ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein

... taxes, even those imposed by the States, be collected by persons of Congressional appointment? and would it not be advisable to pay the collectors so much per cent on the sums collected?" This, as his son says, "is the intuitive idea of a general government, truly such, which he first proposed to Congress, and earnestly advocated." He was in his twentieth year when he showed himself capable of understanding the nature of the situation, and the wants of the country. Probably no other person had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... his part seemed to recognize the description, for taking a sort of intuitive bee-line through people and trees, he suddenly brought up ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner

... undecided whether he was taking things too seriously and ought to apologize for being rude to Beatrice or whether his intuitive impression was correct—that Beatrice was not the sort of person he had imagined but that he, per se, was ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... important that all animals should be treated uniformly with kindness. They are all capable of returning affection, and will show it very pleasantly if we manifest affection for them. They also have intuitive perceptions of our emotions which we can not conceal. A sharp, ugly dog will rarely bite a person who has no fear of him. A horse knows the moment a man mounts or takes the reins whether he is afraid or not; and so ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... noses and caw with contempt at our institutions—even at our oldest buildings and most solemn and dignified oaks. It is very doubtful if they would be conciliated into any respect for the Capitol or The White House at Washington. They have an intuitive and most discriminating perception of antiquity, and their adhesion to it is invincible. Whether they came in with the Normans, or before, history does not say. One thing would seem evident. They are older than the Order of the Garter, and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... disease, fear and sorrow; they are not troubled (in mind). In course of birth, mature or immature, or while ensconced in the womb, in every condition, they with spiritual eyes recognize the relation of their soul to the supreme Spirit. Those great-minded Rishis of positive and intuitive knowledge passing through this arena of actions, return again to the abode of the celestials. Men, O king, attain what they have in consequence of the grace of the gods of Destiny or of their own actions. Do thou not think otherwise. O Yudhishthira, I regard that as ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... fine but fearful soul with an exquisite tenderness. "Confusion of mind," with its inhibiting sadness and helplessness, is of all evils in the world the one most abhorrent to her clear, decisive, intuitive nature. Against this, his besetting danger, she seeks with all her customary vigour to protect her beloved disciple. The love rather than the wrath of God was, as we have seen, ever the chief burden of Catherine's teaching. Never did she dwell on it more earnestly than here, as with searching ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... juggled out of the ingenuous mind. The masses are governed by religion, directly and indirectly, to an extent much greater than at first thought appears. The daily life of the agnostic himself is shaped by his Christian heredity and environment. Now our Author furnishes no substitute for this intuitive demand of being. If reason can supply nothing in place of religion, why not allow those who possess religious conviction to retain so agreeable, and to others beneficial, a belief?—Now right here ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... some intuitive idea of what was in his mind came to her, for, although he had never uttered a word of love to her except by inference, she knew in her own heart he cared for her ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn

... doubted. If the libertine gazed on her features, it awoke in him recollections that had long slumbered; of the time when his heart beat but for one. If, in her immediate sphere, any littleness of feeling was brought to her notice, it was met with an intuitive doubt, followed by painful surprise, that such feeling, foreign as she felt it to be to her own nature, could really have ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... John!" said the doctor, tenderly, as he bent and laid his hand upon the senseless wrist of the trooper, from which it recoiled with an intuitive knowledge of his fate. "John! where are you hurt?—can ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... Selina, while Elizabeth, who by some miraculous effort of intuitive genius, had succeeded in collecting the luggage, was now engaged in defending it from all comers, especially porters, and making of it a comfort ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)

... dug in the spruce woods behind the cabin, and the coffin, which had been resting upon the scaffold since January, was taken down and reverently lowered into the earth by Richard and Douglas. Mrs. Gray, though still firm in the intuitive belief that her boy lived, wept piteously when the earth clattered down upon the box and hid it ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... career, his only preparation was to master his subject; words of the best and most effective kind never failed him. There is little doubt, that elaborate preparation would have marred the effect of O'Connell's oratory. He, like all great men, had a quick, intuitive mind—one, in fact, that could scarcely bear the tedium of careful preparation, and the true character of which came out in cross-examining and in reply; for although great and lucid in statement, he was still more powerful in reply. Woe to the man who provoked the lion to ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... travels, and outlandish incidents and vicissitudes, which, methought, had hardly been paralleled since the days of Gulliver or De Foe. When his dignified reserve was overcome, he had the faculty of narrating these adventures with wonderful eloquence, working up his descriptive sketches with such intuitive perception of the picturesque points that the whole was thrown forward with a positively illusive effect, like matters of your own visual experience. In fact, they were so admirably done that I could never more than half believe them, because the genuine affairs of life are not ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... natural that Helen, with the intuitive discernment of a pure and upright mind, and the penetration of a quick-witted woman, should be the first to detect the falsehood and cowardice of the boaster Parolles, who imposes ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... wonderful memory and rare legal judgment. He was thoroughly grounded in the principles of law. He possessed, as well, some of that common sense which enabled him to see what the law ought to be, and above all else, he had the strongest intuitive perception of truth. He could strip a case of its toggery and go right to its vitals. He was bold, clean, fearless, and impetuous, and when convinced he had right on his side would fight through all the courts, with irresistible impulse. He was susceptible to ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall

... What intuitive feeling was it that made her wish he would say no more! Jack was opening his pocket-book, and drew out a piece ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... control. Through birth control she will attain to voluntary motherhood. Having attained this, the basic freedom of her sex, she will cease to enslave herself and the mass of humanity. Then, through the understanding of the intuitive forward urge within her, she will not stop at patching up the world; ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... but Nature:—she bestows Intuitive preception, and while art O'ertasks himself with guile, loves to disclose The dark soul in the eye, to warn ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks

... differing theories of the various writers on this subject, who would give Egypt, or India, or the lost Atlantis, as the birthplace of the doctrine, we feel that such ideas are but attempts to attribute a universal intuitive belief to some favored part of the race. We do not believe that the doctrine of Reincarnation ever "originated" anywhere, as a new and distinct doctrine. We believe that it sprang into existence whenever and wherever man arrived at a stage of intellectual ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... His capabilities as a soldier have been generally recognized by competent authorities. As a ruler he committed some errors, but his youth and inexperience and the extreme difficulty of his position must be taken into consideration. He was not without aptitude for diplomacy, and his intuitive insight and perception of character sometimes enabled him to outwit the crafty politicians by whom he was surrounded. His principal fault was a want of tenacity and resolution; his tendency to unguarded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... at Frankfort intolerably dull. He had a contempt for his diplomatic associates generally, and made fun of them to his few intimate friends. He took them in almost at a glance, for he had an intuitive knowledge of character; he weighed them in his balance, and found them wanting. In a letter to his wife, he writes: "Nothing but miserable trifles do these people trouble themselves about. They strike me as infinitely more ridiculous with their important ponderosity concerning the gathered rags ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... of ludicrous errors. Others have had the disadvantage of knowing too much, of ignoring the beginning of things, of supposing that the person who reads will take much for granted. For a person who has an intuitive knowledge of etiquette, who has been brought up from his mother's knee in the best society, has always known what to do, how to dress, to whom to bow, to write in the simplest way about etiquette would be impossible; he would never know how little the reader, ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... certain physiologists affirm that our members are more completely exhausted by desire than by the most keen enjoyments. And really, does not desire constitute of itself a sort of intuitive possession? Does it not stand in the same relation to visible action, as those incidents in our mental life, in which we take part in a dream, stand to the incidents of our actual life? This energetic apprehension of things, does it not call into being an internal emotion more powerful ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... station, from his violent passions, his insolent treatment of his adversaries, his utter want of self-command, his almost unrivalled faculty of awakening hatred, to be attributed to the sagacious and intuitive wisdom of Rome?" ('History of Latin Christianity,' Book ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... piteous! most piteous!" said the mother-superior, in a mournful tone. "We do the very best we can for these poor, deserted babes; but young infants, bereft of their mother's milk, which is their life, and of their mother's tender love and intuitive care, suffer more than any of us can estimate, and are almost sure to perish, out of this life, at least. With all our care and pains, more ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... a gambler's faith in a hunch, or presentiment, or intuitive conclusion—whatever term one chooses to apply—but from the moment he spoke of seeing four riders on a ridge during that frolic of the elements, a crazy idea kept persistently turning over and over in my mind; and when Mac got that ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... outer, causes. He granted that, for some things, man's reason is sufficient. The existence of God, the doctrine of original sin, and the soul's immortality need no Scripture to reveal them. They are intuitive subjects of knowledge. But these truths are extremely limited; man needs what nature has not given him. Kant's distinction between practical and speculative reason was in favor of the former, since its aim was wisdom. But ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... which was intuitive and unfailing in all matters of moment, disapproved the sentence, and commuted it to one sending Mr. Vallandigham beyond our military lines to his friends of the Southern Confederacy. The estimable and venerable Judge Leavett of the United-States District Court was ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... and loose with the facts, blow hot and cold, prove that black is white and white black, travel out of the record, parler a tort et a travers[Fr][obs3], put oneself out of court, not have a leg to stand on. judge hastily, shoot from the hip, jump to conclusions (misjudgment) 481. Adj. intuitive, instinctive, impulsive; independent of reason, anterior to reason; gratuitous, hazarded; unconnected. unreasonable, illogical, false, unsound, invalid; unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous|, absonant[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... men and women have spoken on their platforms, and held official places as co-workers in their societies through all of these thirty-seven years. All this has taken place with very little argument or discussion, but from an intuitive sense of the justice and consequent benefits of such a course. A single testimony, of many that might be given from their writings, must suffice. In the Religio-Philosophical Journal, Chicago, Ill., November 22, 1884, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... whole life. O Mrs. Wimbush, you can not have been blind to my secret! You have seen it written legibly in my face, and have not interposed to check its development. I see you understand me, just as by intuitive fine feeling you can penetrate the meaning of Mendelssohn's Songs without Words. Mrs. Wimbush, you have already far advanced toward learning the birds' language. I may ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... listened, and Monkey, whose intuitive intelligence soaked up hidden meanings like a sponge, certainly caught the trend of what was said. She detailed it later to the others, when Jinny checked her exposition with a puzzled 'but Mother could never have said that,' while Jimbo looked wise and grave, as though he ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... as he bent down. There was great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the visitor could easily see; but each made it, for the other's sake, retiring, not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or acquired, was either the first or second nature of both. In a very few moments Lamps was taking another rounder with his comical features beaming, while Phoebe's laughing eyes (just a glistening speck or so upon their lashes) were again directed by turns to him, and to ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens

... intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature originated from St. John's interpretation of a passage ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... child, finding the smoothest ways, avoiding the stones for her, bidding her see glimpses of distance, or some flower beside the path, always with the unfailing goodness, the same delicate design in all that he did; the intuitive sense of this woman's wellbeing seemed to be innate in him, and as much, nay, perhaps more, a part of his being as the ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... merely the wrecking train of the sartorial system, a casual conjunction for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small clothes. Ah! with humility and gratitude he greets them again later, seeing them at their true worth, the symbol of integration for the whole social fabric. Women, with their intuitive wisdom, are more subtle in this subject. They never wholly outgrow safety pins, and though they love to ornament them with jewellery, precious metal, and enamels, they are naught but safety pins after all. Some ingenious philosopher could write a full ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... woman's presence and counsel in legislation as much as she needs yours in the home; you need the association and influence of woman; her intuitive knowledge of men's character and the effect of measures upon the household; you need her for the economical details of public work; you need her sense of justice and moral courage to execute the laws; you need her for all that is just, merciful ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... had been openly ascribed to the mortification of one who had been thrown, by chance, into an intimate association that was much superior to what he was entitled to maintain by birth; a weakness but too common, and which few have strength of mind to resist or sufficient pride to overcome. The intuitive watchfulness of affection, however, led Adelheid to a different conclusion; she saw that he never affected to conceal, while with equal good taste he abstained from obtrusive allusions to the humble nature of his origin, but she also perceived that there were points ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... presentable portions hang frantically over the swirling current. Occasionally an enthusiastic golfer, driving from the eighth or ninth tees, may be seen to start immediately in headlong pursuit of a diverted ball, the swing of the club and the intuitive leap of the legs forward forming so continuous a movement that the main purpose of the game often becomes obscured to the mere spectator. Nearer, in the numerous languid swales that nature has generously provided to protect the interests of the manufacturers, or in the rippling patches of unmown ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... sing the French "romance" or the English song, or he would "dire la chansonnette," and what with his sympathetic tenor and his intuitive knowledge of music, he seemed to be able to express more than many who had had the advantage of a musical training. A few old letters of his remind me that we were audacious enough to write verses and music, he doing the former, I ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... family! I thought you and mamma had'—and then she stopped, checking her natural interest regarding their future life, as she saw the gathering gloom on her father's brow. But he, with his quick intuitive sympathy, read in her face, as in a mirror, the reflections of his own moody depression, and turned it off with ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... true, if man in his primitive state possessed intuitive powers which have sunk into abeyance, either through the diversion of psychic energy to the development of other powers, or through desuetude, or as the instincts of the new-born babe are lost when their brief purpose is fulfilled; if the occasional recrudescence of these powers among civilized ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... man's exploratory path, the waiting was not long until man found it. They had not led him to it through any intuitive change of course that he might find suspect. The explorers landed, claimed it for Earth, and went away. None among them felt any pull from the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... what was passing in her mind. From his father he had inherited a kind of womanish intuition. A pleasant-tempered man Bernard Darcy had always been called, but it was that delicate tact, the intuitive knowledge of what would ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... "Ah! an intuitive feeling told me so; and at Rose Cottage; and the woodland at the outskirts of our grounds hides it from the Hall; and a man and woman could meet and plot unobserved; but, god-mother mine, let us away to dress; the first bells are sounding their sweet musical invitation, and I shall try to ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny

... captive girl and folded her in her arms. As it was, the impulse was too spontaneous and sudden to be entirely resisted, and she held forth her other hand to lift the kneeling figure, when a strange, intuitive perception of something which she could scarcely explain, caused her to withhold ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice—the intuitive feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality. Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... emotion my mother's own account of the wonderful energy and indomitable perseverance by which, in her ardent thirst for knowledge, she overcame obstacles apparently insurmountable, at a time when women were well-nigh totally debarred from education; and the almost intuitive way in which she entered upon studies of which she had scarcely heard the names, living, as she did, among persons to whom they were utterly unknown, and who disapproved of her devotion to pursuits so different from ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... a curious fact in the history of progress, that, by a kind of intuitive insight, the earlier observers seem to have had a wider, more comprehensive recognition of natural phenomena as a whole than their successors, who far excel them in their knowledge of special points, but often lose their grasp of broader relations in the more minute investigation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... contrabandists had debated the best means of evading the laws of their country. At heart every man is a smuggler, and how much more every woman! She would have no scruple in ruining the silk and woolen interest throughout the United States. She is a free-trader by intuitive perception of right, and is limited in practice by nothing but fear of the statute. What could be taken into the States without detection, was the subject before that wicked conclave; and next, what it would pay to buy in Canada. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... had no lack. Were I to select a guide from among the ancient philosophers, it should undoubtedly be Plato, who acquired the idea of the beautiful not by dissection, which never can give it, but by intuitive inspiration, and in whose works the germs of a genuine Philosophy of Art, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... that trees and flowers are indeed individuals, fully conscious of a personal life and happy in that life. The return to urban surroundings makes the vision fade; yet the memory remains, like a great love or a glimpse of mystic insight, as an intuitive conviction of ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa

... With an intuitive knowledge of human nature, the great poet purposely uses the above objectionable word. How could he do otherwise, or how more effectually, and less offensively, extricate Molly Brown from the unpleasant tenantry of the proposed under-ground ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various



Words linked to "Intuitive" :   intuit, nonrational, spontaneous, unlogical, illogical



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