Quotes About Instinct

Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules, but beware instinct. The lion will not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter. I was a coward on instinct.

When you have proved that God is merely a name for the sex instinct, it appears to me not far to the perception that the sex instinct is God.

The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves.

It is only my eye that has helped me. I am still hopeless with that thing called a scale ruler. I love color, but that comes very naturally to me. From the beginning, I never followed trends. If I was aware of them, I didn't care, for I believed as I do now, that rooms should be timeless and very personal. I don't set out to achieve a particular style. And I certainly don't have a 'look' - just a mishmash of everything that somehow, by instinct, usually turns out to be a warm imaginative, 'living room'.

It felt like I'd been playing second-string football for a long time, when, suddenly, I was playing in the Super Bowl. Even when 'Basic Instinct' was a hit, I still felt like I was running with that ball toward the end zone. It took awhile for me to realize that I was already in the end zone with the ball down and the crowd screaming on its feet.

we are beginning to understand that this instinct of sex which has been so great a cause of suffering and shame and has been treated as a subject fit only for furtive whispers or silly jokes, is in fact one of the greatest powers in human nature, and that its misuse is indeed 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.

The point is that one's got an instinct to live. One doesn't live because one's reason assents to living. People who, as we say, 'would be better dead' don't want to die! People who apparently have everything to live for just let themselves fade out of life because they haven't got the energy to fight.

I'm absolute attacking my own instinct for politeness, but I think I admire artists who just speak out or who are strong, so it's very hard.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.

First of all I trust my own instinct, experience that I gained over years and feeling when the moment is right for buying shares. That is what one calls intuition.

Intuition is a strange instinct that tells a woman she is right, whether she is or not.

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

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.

Instinct is the direct connection with truth.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.

Nobody taught Picasso how to paint - he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can't learn what's right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you.

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones.

I don't have a very good relationship with baking. I do bake sometimes, but my natural instinct is to just do what feels right a lot, and that's what you're not supposed to do in baking. I'm not a good baker.

My soul was always so full of aspirations, that a God was a necessity to me. I was like a bird with an instinct of migration upon me, and a country to migrate to was as essential as it is to the bird

I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.

Sometimes I think that I understand my movies after I make them. Really. I go very often off of instinct.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power's sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one's own rules.

The herd instinct seems to be the strongest human emotion, one that the race is constantly breeding off as the mavericks are liquidated. Happiness is running with the crowd.

Pride of one's work is not improper, unladylike, or vain. We can all take a lesson from the sea turtle. She does not travel thousands of miles or risk all for her ego. She has an instinct for greatness --- one that I believe is found in all living creatures.

Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

We are not held accountable for how the economy ravages Congo. Governments aren't held accountable for foreign policies that they exercise there. There are no institutional structures to render justice. The press is very limited. There's very little transparency. You find a symmetry in certain basic human tendencies, and these tendencies are not always noble or beautiful. I think we have an instinct to turn away from that, to not acknowledge it, while it is something that's a part of us. There's a certain tragic and sad side to human nature that, in our quest for beauty, we ignore.

The fans [of Vampire diaries] that we have now are the people who will watch it any day of the week. So, my first instinct was a little bit of an ego tap, but the second I processed it, I was fine. The only weird thing will be maybe not having as many people live tweeting because they're actually out doing something more interesting on Friday night. I'm not going to sit at home, reading Twitter on Friday night.

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

Sweet instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.

Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

I just think racism is within each and every one of us. It's everyone's responsibility to figure out how they deal with this kind of obsolete instinct.

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.

How many men I know who are earning dollars aplenty, but who are really earning little of what counts. They are so overwhelmingly engrossed in business that they get nothing from their dollars. The Juggernaut of dollar-making has crushed out of them every capacity for genuine enjoyment, every grace, every unselfish sentiment and instinct.

I wish I could tell you to always follow your heart, but I think it is bad advice. You have a heart, yes, it is true, but also a brain and also a soul. I've come to believe that we love with our brains as much as our hearts. Real Love is not just instinct, but intent...... From year to year, you may not always be the same Jane. This is perfectly normal. A Jane is many Janes in a lifetime.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, [I] submit myself to my instinct to decide for me.

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

In terms of what we share from our lives, I tend to share everything. My instinct would be to share everything.

The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy. It was not granted by monarchs, it was not gained for us by aristocracies; but it sprang from the people, and, with an immortal instinct, it has always worked for the people.

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

The creative instinct has always been a stronger motive than mere profit to do truly new and revolutionary things.

I've never been trained as an actress, so it's all instinct. I just let myself go into this kind of a free fall. Sometimes I feel scared, or out of my element - like everyone else knows what they're doing but me. I don't know . . . Maybe I function well with fear or I like to be faced with a challenge . . . I think I'm just a work in progress.

Accidents on big mountains happen when people's ambitions cloud their good judgment. Good climbing is about climbing with heart and with instinct, not ambition and pride.

Without the instinct for adventure, any civilization, however enlightened; any state, however well-ordered, will wilt and wither.

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.