Quotes About Instinct

Yes, I suffer terribly from depression. I have to work at being happy, it's not my natural instinct. My natural instinct is, if something wonderful happens, to throw water in my own face.

There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child - and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.

As much as the world has an instinct for evil and is a breeding ground for genocide, holocaust, slavery, racism, war, oppression, and injustice, the world has an even greateer instinct for goodness, rebirth, mercy, beauty, truth, freedom and love.

I think the industry tends to like to think in the narrow sort of mindset of a businessman, and businessman absolutes, and movies really exist in a much grayer region of dreams and stuff like that, and instinct is prized in movies, it's not prized with the businessmen in movies, but movies themselves often reward instinct rather than pie charts.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

Man only of all earthly creatures, asks, Can the dead die forever? - and the instinct that urges the question is God's answer to man, for no instinct is given in vain.

Influences come from everywhere but when you are actually shooting you work primarily by instinct. But what is instinct? It is a lifetime accumulation of influence: experience, knowledge, seeing and hearing. There is little time for reflection in taking a photograph. All your experiences come to a peak and you work on two levels: conscious and unconscious.

I prepare to the point where instinct take over.

Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.

Nothing ever fits the palm so perfectly, or feels so right, or inspires so much protective instinct as the hand of a child

When God will have any great matters done, he sets his people's hearts to work at prayer by a kind of gracious instinct. He stirs them up and moves their hearts by the influence of his Holy Spirit.

Sometimes I'll read a script and think, "That's not how humans behave," or "I don't understand how to do that and make it seem like I'm not some kind of strange alien or on a sitcom." I don't get it, and when I feel that way, I have to listen to my instinct.

Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.

I've done a few movies where I really liked the project, but I wasn't sure about the director, and I still did it and my instinct was right, in the beginning. Even though it was a good story, the guy still didn't really know what he was doing.

I was taught that candles are like house cats - domesticated versions of something wild and dangerous. There's no way to know how much of that killer instinct lurks in the darkness. I used to think the house-burning paranoia was the result of some upper-middle-class fear regarding the potential destruction of a half-million-dollar Westchester house the size of a matchbox. But then I realized the fear stemmed from something far less complex: we're not used to fire. Candles are a staple of the Judaic existence and, like many suburban residents before us, we're pretty bad Jews.

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.

If sensuality be our only happiness we ought to envy the brutes, for instinct is a surer, shorter, safer guide to such happiness than reason.

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

This was not some pretty little girl, coyly flirtatious, delicately stimulated. This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong demanding that all the life within her be matched. Her instinct would detect any hedging, any dishonesty, any less than complete response to her - and then she would be gone for good.

[Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise.

I don't know what to believe in the mainstream media anymore. My instinct is to not believe any of it, and it's their fault.

A good man, through obscurest aspirations Has still an instinct of the one true way.

Style is primarily a matter of instinct.

As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

As an adult after college and as an artist I thought about what was real, what sustained me - it was Christian Science. I was using that when I didn't know it. Saying yes to the Light and your better instinct.

Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of seeing me interact with house pets knows I have a wickedly strong paternal instinct bordering on the maternal.

...just like some people's instinct to photograph is triggered by vacation... assignments might be that to me and that's why I've built my life around assignments. That was the way to live the photographic life.

The instinct of the people is right.

I had been a storyteller by instinct all my life. I was that boring little kid who made the rest of his friends sit around the campfire and listen to his ghost stories. It's been very much a part of my makeup.

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

Capitalism is chronically unstable.Boom and bust has always marked capitalism in the United States. There were panics in 1785, 1791, 1819, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1907, 1929 and 1987.In economies and politics, as in war, an astonishing number of people die, like the man on the railway crossing, defending their right of way. This is a poorly developed instinct in Switzerland. No country so firmly avows the principles of private enterprise but in few have the practical concessions to socialism been more numerous and varied.

There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.

Part of the challenge with leadership is that it's very driven by gut instinct in most cases - and even worse, everyone thinks they're really good at it. The reality is that very few people are.

There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.

To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.

This is how good movies get made and always have: from the gut instinct of the financiers, not just by committee and research.

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

Sweet instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.

When I watch species other than my own, their instinct's wisdom is what most impresses and disturbs me.

This word "LOVE" - discredited, "clicheed" - can be restored and love, the instinct, the impulse to care for somebody in the hope that somebody will care for you - plus our language, the language, a language - is about all we have. With everything else going on, this is what makes us, what keeps us human.

Fashion is a language. Some know it, some learn it, some never will - like an instinct.

Faith is certitude without proofs ... Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don't like the wispy and the vague... or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I'm impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I've done have come to me by instinct.

The death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.