Quotes About Instinct

Boxing brings out my aggressive instinct, not necessarily a killer instinct.

You think my first instinct is to protect you. Because you're small, or a girl, or a Stiff. But you're wrong." He leans his face close to mine and wraps his fingers around my chin. His hand smells like metal. When was the last time he held a gun, or a knife? My skin tingles at the point of contact, like he's transmitting electricity through his skin. "My first instinct is to push you until you break, just to see how hard I have to press." he says, his fingers squeezing at the word break. My body tenses at the edge in his voice, so I am coiled as tight as a spring, and I forget to breathe.

Babies are born with the instinct to speak, the way spiders are born with the instinct to spin webs. You don't need to train babies to speak; they just do. But reading is different.

I always believe your instinct is the most correct instinct.

There is something that can happen to every athlete and every human being; the instinct to slack off, to give in to pain, to give less than your best; the instinct to hope you can win through luck or through your opponent not doing his best, instead of going to the limit and past your limit where victory is always found. Defeating those negative instincts that are out to defeat us, is the difference between winning and losing - and we all face that battle every day.

Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

... religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development--begun now and ending never.

A true religious instinct never deprived man of one single joy; mournful faces and a sombre aspect are the conventional affectations of the weak-minded.

Yeah, but if you're not doing what everyone else is doing then you're going to be misunderstood. People are going to wonder why you're trying to be different; it's just a natural instinct.

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'.

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 didn't know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book - that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I'm glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.

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.

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'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.

It was like Mama suddenly realized I was good, that she didn't have to apologize for me. It was the strangest feeling. One minute I was on stage with my mother, the next moment I was on stage with Judy Garland. One minute she smiled at me, and the next minute she was like the lioness that owned the stage and suddenly found somebody invading her territory. The killer instinct of a performer had come out in her.

The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.

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.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

Instinct is the direct connection with truth.

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

Style is primarily a matter of instinct.

When I first started out in my career, I'd been a lit major in college so I didn't have a lot of choices. The traditional options were management consultant or investment banking, and I hadn't even taken an economics class so those were pretty much out. I didn't want to go into academia. For me, research and instinct were my unique tools that seemed to work best on a marketing and merchandizing path. It's kind of right-brain and left-brain.

The Killer instinct is not perceived by words, but by look.

A general loathing of a gang or sect usually has some sound basis in instinct.

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.

Imitation is the first instinct of the awakening mind.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct.

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.

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.

My first instinct was to cast as close to the short story as possible, but then I realized that I needed actors who could go for it and that they had to function well as a couple in a love story.

Because trying to see all sides, such an instinct is particularly Jewish.

There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.

I love musicals and music driven films, and my first instinct is to tell the story. And when music is a big part of the action I can literally make the story sing!

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

I think that the way that I write stories is by instinct. You have some basic ideas - a character, or an image, or a situation that sounds compelling - and then you just feel your way around until you find the edges of your story. It's like going into a dark room... you stumble around until you find the walls and then inch your way to the light switch.

Here my powers rest from their high fantasy, but already I could feel my being turned- instinct and intellect balanced equally. as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars- by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.

A tendency toward enthusiasm and a chivalrous instinct have more than once been weighed as evidence of a lack of judgment.

You must believe in your own instincts and your own instincts at any particular time and believe that they were the right ones for any given situation. So, there's no point ever of kind of regretting something because you can't properly remember the exact circumstances in which you were playing out this particular scene. You have to believe in your intuition and your instinct at that moment.

I never considered myself a good photographer. I still don't. I thought of myself as a hard worker. My camera was a sponge and I had an instinct that athletes have - anticipation. Photography really represents an enormous amount of anticipation - understanding what might be there the next moment and being prepared for it.

My first instinct is to push you until you break just to see how hard I have to press.

I am someone who always gets up again, even if there are setbacks. I have a survivor instinct. I'm not sure where it comes from, but probably from all the little things that make you into who you are.

We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.

It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.