What is Intuition?

"Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge." (Aristotle)

"Knowledge has three degrees - opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition." (Plotinus)

"Intuition is the conception of an attentive mind, so clear, so distinct, and so effortless that we cannot doubt what we have so conceived.” (René Descartes)

“The disclosure of a new fact, the leap forward, the conquest over yesterday’s ignorance, is an act not of reason but of imagination, of intuition.” (Charles Nicolle)

"The supreme task is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can lead to them." (Albert Einstein)

“Intuition is perception via the unconscious that brings forth ideas, images, new possibilities and ways out of blocked situations.” (Carl Jung)

“Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.” (Isaac Asimov, “Forward the Foundation”, 1993)

“Intuition, mind’s originary act of ‘seeing’ what is given to him […]” (Hermann Weyl, “Mind and Nature”, 2009)

 “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” (Robert Graves)

"This covert mechanism would be the source of what we call intuition, the mysterious mechanism by which we arrive at the solution of a problem without reasoning toward it." (Antonio Damasio, “Descartes' Error”, 2005)

"Patterns experienced again and again become intuitions. […] Intuitive judgments are made by our use of imagery; intuition is the result of mental model building. […] The mental model used and the form of the intuition is dependent upon the question being answered." (Roger Frantz, “Two Minds”, 2005)

"An intuition is neither caprice nor a sixth sense but a form of unconscious intelligence." (Gerd Gigerenzer, “Risk Savvy”, 2015)