Quotes & Sayings About Hunches

There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect. — Eric Hoffer

I had a hunch. Officially, scientists don't work on hunches. We work on hypotheses and observations and plenty of evidence. Hunches don't get you research funding, tenure at your university, or access to the world's largest telescopes. But a hunch was all I had. — Mike Brown

I feel like if we can use the combination of basically data-driven hunches and bet on really first-class talent to deliver the shows, that I think we could do as well as the networks do, who basically have a 75 to 80 percent failure rate for new shows anyway - even after all that development and pilot work. — Ted Sarandos

Districts 7 and 11 as well. If my hunches are right, this would mean almost half the districts have at least attempted to rebel. Do — Suzanne Collins

pay attention to that little voice inside your head that sends you prompts, insights, and hunches. Note things that you don't understand, and rather than shying away from them, turn them into questions to pursue. — Todd Henry

Though we [Humanists] take a strict position on what constitutes knowledge, we are not critical of the source of ideas. Often intuitive feelings, hunches, speculation, and flashes of inspiration prove to be excellent sources of novel approaches, new ways of looking at things, new discoveries, and new information. We do not disparage those ideas derived from religious experience, altered states of consciousness, or the emotions; we merely declare that testing these ideas against reality is the only way to determine their validity as knowledge. — Fred Edwords

Feelings could override facts, as facts could alter feelings. Choose the truth first, rather than following after feelings. — Anthony Liccione

Bess stepped back and looked at Nancy admiringly. 'Your hunches are so often right it startles me. — Carolyn Keene

Whether you job involves chasing criminals, crouching numbers, or wrestling with paperwork, learning how to recognize and rely on those hunches and gut feelings can dramatically improve your job performance. — Laurie Nadel

We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel ... And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it. — James Hillman

Listen to your hunches, pay attention to your intuition, do not dismiss your random thoughts, inspirations or ideas ... They could be giving you the best advice you ever had ... — Neale Donald Walsch

Become a good noticer. Pay attention to the feelings, hunches, and intuitions that flood your life each day. If you do, you will see that premonitions are not rare, but a natural part of our lives. — Larry Dossey

When you are doing a lot of hard fast field work, it's a physical necessity to forget every day. You can't try to remember it in any continuity. You get so burdened if you try to do it the other way. You can't dictate to your material ... We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches. And it was hard, hard living. — Dorothea Lange

Still, I had a hunch about it, and if there's one thing I've learned in my long and stupid career as a man, it's the importance of listening to my hunches. — Paul Auster

[...] I've learned something about my own hunches: the only time they turn out to be meaningful is when I ignore them. — Steven Brust

Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. — Joyce Brothers

Oda once said that when you speak excessively, it isn't necessarily communicating," Jimmi says as he hunches over, resting his elbows on his knees. He yawns and doesn't cover his mouth.
"What does that mean?"
"It means that you can shut your mouth and still say what you need to say using the other gifts the gods gave us. — Celia Mcmahon

The whole house is spic and span and everybody's supposed to be real honest and full of what he calls 'the good'. We even leave food out for the mice in the rafters so they won't have to sin by stealing. And you know what happens when dinner's over? Everybody hunches over and licks his place clean so none of God's grace will be wasted. — Yukio Mishima

And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over - heaven, the ether,
the celestial works - and said, Fuck it, I want to be human? — Kim Addonizio

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank. — Steven Johnson

My mom stares at him in disbelief. "This is thanks to your schemes. You pressured her to choose you ... to choose Wonderland over her other side. What did you think would happen?"
Morpheus hunches lower, miserable. — A.G. Howard

Hunches are not to be sneezed at. — Richard Nelson Bolles

If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches. — Steven Johnson

Hunches are a kind of subterranean logic shorthand. — Joyce Brothers

The soul faithfully comes to our aid through dreams, deep emotion, love, the quiet voice of guidance, synchronicities, revelations, hunches, and visions, and at times through illness, nightmares, and terrors. — Bill Plotkin

It can be shown that maximum diversification is achieved by holding each stock in proportion to its value to the entire market (italics added) ... Hindsight plays tricks on our minds ... often distorts the past and encourages us to play hunches and outguess other investors, who in turn are playing the same game. For most of us, trying to beat the market leads to disastrous results ... our actions lead to much lower returns than can be achieved by just staying in the market. — Jeremy Siegel

Call it a hunch; and hunches don't just materialise, you pay for them with hard-earned experience. No such thing as a free hunch. — Tom Holt

I don't believe in hunches. Hunches are for dogs making love. — Amarillo Slim

Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. — William, Saroyan

Unfortunately, in the field of evolution most explanations are not good. As a matter of fact, they hardly qualify as explanations at all; they are suggestions, hunches, pipe dreams, hardly worthy of being called hypotheses. — Norman Macbeth

Understanding was coming so fast, it seemed to bypass thought. — J.K. Rowling

Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted. — Dean Koontz

Use of analytics is accelerating, and that means more data-driven
decision making and fewer hunches. Evidence-based management
complements analytics by adding validated cause-and-effect relationships
between policies and effects. — Paul Gibbons

We want to be known for having original ideas, inspired hunches, and gut feelings that make a difference. Indeed, a "well-honed sixth sense"' is considered a measure of the good clinician. But being a good doctor also requires sticking with the best medical evidence, even if it contradicts your personal experience. We need to distinguish between gut feeling and testable knowledge, between hunches and empirically tested evidence. — Robert A. Burton

Why? Because your grandfather gets hunches and you have some sort of psychic abilities, do you automatically believe everything? Someone walks in your door saying she can torch the place using her mind, do you accept it as fact? Demons, vampires, werewolves? Sounds like a good idea for a TV show. Your partner is named Sam - are you sure your name isn't Dean? — Rysa Walker

Reality is nothing more than a collective hunch. — Lily Tomlin

What is reality anyway! It's nothing but a collective hunch. — Jane Wagner

I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies. — J. Jack Halberstam

I am more the inspirational type of speller. I work on hunches rather than mere facts, and the result is sometimes open to criticism by purists. — Robert Benchley

Often you have to rely on intuition. — Bill Gates

Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches. — Leo Burnett

We must trust our thoughts while we sleep. We must trust our hunches. We must begin to examine all of those things that we think of as irrational simply because we do not understand them. In other words, we must distrust the rational, the logical, the sane, in an attempt to reach for something higher, for something more worthy. — Jeff VanderMeer

There was an unspoken understanding that when a reporter chased a story, hunches and theories became airborne and other reporters could catch them like a cold. — Marisha Pessl

When your mind is functioning correctly, there is an out streaming of light from within in the form of inspiration, hunches, leadings, and intuitive flashes - trust this process of inspiration. "In the twinkling of an eye" ideas and plans may flow into your mind. — Eric Butterworth

It is very difficult to make a vigorous, plausible, and job-risking defense of an estimate that is derived by no quantitative method, supported by little data, and certified chiefly by the hunches of the managers — Fred Brooks

Maylon Stark was medium-built and husky. That was the only word to fit him, husky. He had a husky face, and the nose on it was badly bent and flattened huskily. His voice was husky. His head sat huskily on his neck, the way a fighter carries his chin pulled in from habit. It was the huskiness of a man who hunches up his shoulders and hangs on hard with both hands. And with it Maylon Stark had a peculiar perpetual expression, like that of a man who is hanging hard onto the earth to keep it from moving away, out from under him. The line from the right side of his flattened nose to the corner of his mouth was three times as deep as the same line on the left side; his mouth did not curl, but the deepness of this line made him look like he was about to smile sardonically, or cry wearily, or sneer belligerently. You never knew which. And you never found out which. Because Maylon Stark never did any of them. — James Jones

The creative process requires more than reason. Most original thinking isn't even verbal. It requires 'a groping experimentation with ideas, governed by intuitive hunches and inspired by the unconscious.' The majority of business men are incapable of original thinking because they are unable to escape from the tyranny of reason. Their imaginations are blocked. — David Ogilvy

The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along. — Clarence Darrow

At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream. — David Berlinski

I know I told you to go to hell," I say, "but I'm glad you ignored me."
"Delia, that newspaper story
"
"You know what?" I say, trying to keep my voice from breaking. "Right now, I don't need a journalist. But I sure could use a friend."
He hunches his shoulders. "I have references."
I offer up the smallest smile, a bridge between us. "Actually," I confess, "you're the only one who applied. — Jodi Picoult

I always tried to play my hunches. — Gene Tierney

The doctrine of Scripture teaches us about the authority of God's Word. Scripture must be the final rule of faith and practice for our lives. Not our feelings or emotions. Not signs or prophetic words or hunches. — Joshua Harris

We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang. — China Mieville

The idea of safety had shrunk into particles - one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heightens the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks. — Diane Ackerman

Women's curiosity was given a negative connotation, whereas men were called investigative. Women were called nosy, whereas men were called inquiring. In reality, the trivialization of women's curiosity so that it seems like nothing more than irksome snooping denies women's insight, hunches, and intuitions. It denies all her senses. It attempts to attack her fundamental power. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

We got to roll with the punches, play all of our hunches, make the best of whatever comes your way. Forget that blind ambition, learn to trust your intuition - plowing straight ahead, come what may. — Jimmy Buffett

Good science requires distinguishing between "felt knowledge" and knowledge arising out of testable observations. "I am sure" is a mental sensation, not a testable conclusion. Put hunches, gut feelings, and intuitions into the suggestion box. Let empiric methods shake out the good from bad suggestions. — Robert A. Burton

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch. — Zoe Heller

Going with intuition a lot of times is very lonely. You're going on hunches - a little voice in here says, "Go this way." And your mind is saying, "You're crazy." — Stacy Peralta

Poetry is mostly hunches. — John Ashbery

When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation. — Stephen Jay Gould

A basic truth that the history of the creation of the transistor reveals is that the foundations of transistor electronics were created by making errors and following hunches that failed to give what was expected. — William Shockley