"Intuition is reason in a hurry"
About this Quote
Aphorisms like this are little verbal machines: small enough to memorize, sharp enough to argue with. “Intuition is reason in a hurry” takes a concept that people like to mystify and drags it back to the desk lamp. Jackson’s intent is demystification, but not dismissal. He’s not calling intuition irrational; he’s calling it compressed.
The subtext is a defense of the mind’s backstage labor. Intuition feels like a flash because the steps are hidden, not absent. Jackson implies that what we label “gut” is often pattern-recognition, memory, and inference moving faster than our ability to narrate it. The line works because it flips the usual hierarchy. We’re trained to treat reason as the adult in the room and intuition as the impulsive cousin; Jackson suggests they’re the same person under different time constraints.
Context matters: Jackson wrote in an early 20th-century culture newly fascinated by psychology, efficiency, and the mechanization of thought. In an era of accelerating modern life, “in a hurry” is a sly concession to speed as both necessity and danger. Haste can produce brilliance (the practiced editor’s instant sense that a sentence is lying) or error (the crowd’s instant sense that a scapegoat will do). The quote doesn’t romanticize intuition; it gives it a job description, then quietly warns that rushing any process changes its output.
It’s also a rhetorical power move: by yoking intuition to reason, Jackson makes skepticism sound superstitious. If intuition is just rapid reasoning, ignoring it isn’t being “rational.” It’s being slow on purpose.
The subtext is a defense of the mind’s backstage labor. Intuition feels like a flash because the steps are hidden, not absent. Jackson implies that what we label “gut” is often pattern-recognition, memory, and inference moving faster than our ability to narrate it. The line works because it flips the usual hierarchy. We’re trained to treat reason as the adult in the room and intuition as the impulsive cousin; Jackson suggests they’re the same person under different time constraints.
Context matters: Jackson wrote in an early 20th-century culture newly fascinated by psychology, efficiency, and the mechanization of thought. In an era of accelerating modern life, “in a hurry” is a sly concession to speed as both necessity and danger. Haste can produce brilliance (the practiced editor’s instant sense that a sentence is lying) or error (the crowd’s instant sense that a scapegoat will do). The quote doesn’t romanticize intuition; it gives it a job description, then quietly warns that rushing any process changes its output.
It’s also a rhetorical power move: by yoking intuition to reason, Jackson makes skepticism sound superstitious. If intuition is just rapid reasoning, ignoring it isn’t being “rational.” It’s being slow on purpose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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