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Michael Polanyi Quotes
1891–1976 Hungary
Michael Polanyi (March 11, 1891 – February 22, 1976), born Polányi Mihály, was a Hungarian–British polymath whose thought and work extended across physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
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No sincere assertion of fact is essentially unaccompanied by feelings of intellectual satisfaction or of a persuasive desire and a sense of personal responsibility.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
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.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
The correct reading of \vdash p written down by me in good faith is therefore 'I believe p', or some other words expressing the same fiduciary act.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
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.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
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.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
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.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
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.
Personal Knowledge (1958)
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.
The Logic of Liberty (1951)
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