104 Instinct Quotes

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

I've always believed that acting is instinct to start with; you either have it or you don't.

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.

In time of peril, like the needle to the loadstone, obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to him who is best fitted to command.

The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.

Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies.

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.

Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.

My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Something inside of me just said 'Hey, wait a minute, I want to beat him,' and I just took off.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!

Cats don't hunt seals. They would if they knew what they were and where to find them. But they don't, so that's all right.

All you have in comedy, in general, is just going with your instincts. You can only hope that other people think that what you think is funny is funny. I don't have an answer but I just try to plough straight ahead.

Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.

The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage - scarcely beast in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Great thoughts, great feelings came to them, Like instincts, unawares.

Headmaster: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales. ... Knowing nothing and fearing everything, they rant and rave and riot like so many maniacs. The subject does not matter. Any idea which gives them an excuse of getting excited will serve. They look for a victim to chivy, and howl him down, and finally lynch him in a sheer storm of sexual frenzy which they honestly imagine to be moral indignation, patriotic passion or some equally avowable emotion. It may be an innocent Negro, a Jew like Leo Frank, a harmless half-witted German; a Christ-like idealist of the type of Debs, an enthusiastic reformer like Emma Goldman or even a doctor whose views displease the Medial Trust.

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all. All parents do their best job when they have a natural, easy confidence in themselves. Better to make a few mistakes from being natural than to try to do everything letter-perfect out of a feeling of worry.

In fact the opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

The newspapers print what the people want, and thus does the savage still swing his club and flourish his spear. [Pg. 142.]

I don't think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don't think it's the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed.

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, While meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray.

Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, spreading riotous and strange in their instinct for growth.

'First and foremost, I'd like to continue taking risks with my music. Everything I've done so far has been a gut reaction, honest and real. And that's who I am. That's what I want my music to always be -- honest and real.'

Knowledge must be so absorbed into the mind that it ceases to exist in a separate, objective way.' '...in 1797 the secret of the effectiveness of resisting to the last had not yet been discovered.

See how the child reaches out instinctively To feel how fire will feel. See how the man reaches out instinctively For what he cannot have. The pull and the push of it all.

See how the flower leans instinctively Toward the light. See how the heart reaches out instinctively For no reason but to touch...

Kate will never be an academic artist, drily applying intellectual music theory to the delight of a handful of peers, forging into new areas for the sake of 'progress'. Her style is personal, individual, impressionistic. Like Delius, her music will always flow from poetic necessity, breaking from the confines of tradition because expression demands it. I just hope that she will have the confidence to follow her instincts and not be discouraged by the music press, who in the main are baffled and annoyed by her uniqueness. Unable to pigeon-hole her music, they turn instead to ridicule and condescension to fill the pages. Which is a disservice to the British public who, to their undying credit, have made Kate Bush such a popular success.

In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.

Who can say thus far, no further to the tide of his nature?

The brute by nature knows no self restraint.

Sodom and Gomorrah reclined along the riverbank like two whores kissing each other. Men copulated with other men, women with other women, men with mares, women with bulls. They ate and overate from the Tree of Life; they ate and overate from the Tree of Knowledge. Smashing their sacred statues, they saw that they were filled with air. Coming very, very close to God, they said, 'This God is not the father of Fear, he is the son of Fear,' and they lost their fear. On the four gates to the city they wrote in large yellow letters, THERE IS NO GOD HERE. What does There is no God mean? It means there is no bridle on our instincts, no reward for good or punishment for evil, no virtue, shame, or justice - that we are wolves and she-wolves in heat.

Analyzing things was fine, but good reflexes could save your life.

Are men's lives nothing but the secretions of overactive glands?

Gauguin interests me very much as a man - very much. For a long time now it has seemed to me that in our nasty profession of painting we are most sorely in need of men with the hands and the stomachs of workmen. More natural tastes - more loving and more charitable temperaments - than the decadent dandies of the Parisian boulevards have. Well, here we are without the slightest doubt in the presence of a virgin creature with savage instincts. With Gauguin blood and sex prevail over ambition.

All my instincts, they return and the grand facade, so soon will burn without a noise, without my pride I reach out from the inside.

American liberty has been tentatively saved for the last few decades not by the self-discipline of its citizens but by their instincts, which have not yet been blunted quite enough to prevent the people from realizing imminent dangers at the eleventh hour. Twice, now, we have turned at the last moment and armed ourselves to prevent the discipline of ruthlessness-the next most powerful discipline to responsible liberty-from overthrowing us. This second time, we came within months, and perhaps even weeks, as a body of common men, of a position from which not even our instincts could have extricated us. It is not yet utterly certain that we have escaped, but the presumption is that we shall.

Do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity - This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being.

'I feel that physical beauty connects to the depths of our animalistic selves, and I don't know whether that's good or bad or what. but it's very confusing.'

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.

They say that dogs lick their own genitalia because they can. But I think it's at least partially because they don't have the Internet.

Down the mountain walls From where pan's cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.

I do not belive that I have a thinking problem as much as a feeling problem. What I mean is, I know the Christian answer to most quesitons but I do not always live accordingly. I am not pagan. But my 'goodness' is the product of moral upbringing, not of a coherent biblical worldview. I tend do to and thing as I feel like doing and thinking. There is rarely and exception. I am guided by Pavlovian instincts. Church culture has a vocabulary, and I have learned it well. There is a dress code too, and my clothes are well within the acceptable parameters, I wear Dockers and plaid shirts, as is silently required of twenty-something Christians. I only vote Republican, which is also silently required.

Polly says her back hurts And she's just as bored as me She caught me off my guard Amazes me, the will of instinct.

I was thinking too damn much to be careful. When I stabbed my key in the lock and turned it there was a momentary catch in the tumblers before it went all the way around and I swore out loud as I rammed the door with my shoulder and hit the floor.Something swished through the air over my head and I caught an arm and pulled a squirming, fighting bundle of muscle down on top of me. If I could have reached my rod I would have blown his guts out. His breath was in my face and I brought my knee up, but he jerked out of the way bringing his hand down again and my shoulder went numb after a split second of blinding pain. He tried again with one hand going for my throat, but I got one foot loose and kicked out and up and felt my toe smash onto his groin. The cramp of the pain doubled him over on top of me, his breath sucking in like a leaky tire. Then I got cocky. I thought I had him. I went to get up and he moved. Just once.That thing in his hand smashed against the side of my head and I started to crumple up piece by piece until there wasn't anything left except the sense to see and hear enough to know that he had crawled out of the room and was falling down the stairs outside. Then I thought about the lock on my door and how I had a guy fix it so that I could tell if it had been jimmied open so I wouldn't step into any blind alleys without a gun in my hand, but because of a dame who lay naked and smiling on a bed I wouldn't share, I had forgotten all about it.

He stood with his back angled to the wall. To an indifferent observer he was simply in idle conversation, but it wasn't like that at all. This was an instinctive gesture of survival, being in constant readiness for an attack. His head didn't turn and his eyes didn't seem to move, but I knew he saw us. I could feel the hackles on the back of my neck stiffening and I knew he felt the same way. Dog was meeting dog. Nobody knew it but the dogs and they weren't telling. He was bigger than I thought. The suggestion of power I had seen in his photographs was for real. When he moved it was with the ponderous grace of some jungle animal, dangerously deceptive, because he could move a lot faster if he had to. When we were ten feet away he pretended to see us for the first time and a wave of charm washed the cautious expression from his face and he stepped out to greet Dulcie with outstretched hand. But it wasn't her he was seeing. It was me he was watching. I was one of his own kind. I couldn't be faked out and wasn't leashed by the proprieties of society. I could lash out and kill as fast as he could and of all the people in the room, I was the potential threat. I knew what he felt because I felt the same way myself.

A stylized version of our Ikea present. It is talking about very simple concepts. We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit's motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone.

A madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have done, while she undulated like a snake.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Ihr habt den Weg vom Wurme zum Menschen gemacht, und Vieles ist in euch noch Wurm. Einst wart ihr Affen, und auch jetzt ist der Mensch mehr Affe, als irgend ein Affe.

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul.'

I don't have a technique. I've never been a believer in having one set technique on how to act. There are no rules and there is no rulebook. At the end of the day, it all comes down to my instincts. That's the one thing that guides me through every decision professionally. Socially, also. That's my technique. Yeah, you read through the script 100 times. I guess I have little characteristics about myself. Sometimes, most often than not, once we start shooting I won't look at the script at all until we finished shooting. It's kind of like it's been imprinted in my head during rehearsals. You just let it go.

All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.

'One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.'

Jay-bird don't rob his own nes'.

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.

As spiders touched seek their webs' inmost part, As bees in storms unto their hives return, As blood in danger gathers to the heart, As men seek towns when foes the country burn.

Now overcoming that deficit from the Yankees, us not being very smart, us just playing baseball, I mean, that's the bottom line. I mean, we try to eliminate the thinking, and we've tried to let our natural abilities take over. So I think that's why the phrase about 'the idiots' kind of took off. But we don't think. If we use our brains, we're only hurting the team.

When dark clouds full with new waters are thundering repeatedly, the ruttish wild elephants respond by trumpeting, on the premise that it is the she-elephant's call.

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain.

I have a woman's instinct, and it's always a good one.

Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.

The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs ... are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

The goodness, the sympathy, the self-denial of the nun, of the monk, all come from the mother-instinct, the father-instinct - all were produced by human affection, by the love of man for woman, of woman for man. Love is a transfiguration. It ennobles, purifies and glorifies.

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean.

It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.

The natural man has only two primal passions, to get and to beget.

Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of 'pleasure.' The human being who has become free - and how much more the spirit who has become free - spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. -