Quotes About Instinct

There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only instinct I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as the sin of avarice.

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.

I write a lot from instinct. But as you're writing out of instinct, once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, the craft is always there talking to you in the back of your head...that tells you when it's time to go to the chorus, when it's time to rhyme. Real basic craft... it's second nature.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

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.

Alec licked his spoon, then set it on the table and popped his drink open. "Okay, I may be breaking some kind of girl bonding rule or something, but can I offer you a guy's perspective on this?" I frowned, my spoon halfway to my mouth. "Is this gonna make me want to hit you?" He shrugged. "Maybe. But it's the truth. Here goes: kissing back is an instinct. Unless the girl smells like a sewer or has tentacles feeling you up independently, a guy's first instinct is to kiss back. That's how it works. What's important is how long that kissing back lasted. So...how long?

The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up someair in a spacious apartment, and warms that.... Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts.

Why is it that fools always have the instinct to hunt out the unpleasant secrets of life, and the hardiness to mention them?

There are two sorts of beauty; one is the result of instinct, the other of study. A combination of the two, with the resulting modifications, brings with it a very complicated richness, which the art critic ought to try to discover.

A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.

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 guess I just don't have the killer instinct that I think makes a great political cartoonist.

The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.

Have not Manet and Monet, Cézanne and Matisse, rendered to painting something of the same service which Keats and Shelley gave to poetry after the solemn and ceremonious literary perfections of the eighteenth century? They have brought back to the pictorial art a new draught of joie de vivre; and the beauty of their work is instinct with gaiety, and floats in sparkling air. I do not expect these masters would particularly appreciate my defence, but I must avow an increasing attraction to their work.

Let your *need* guide you behavior. *Supress* your instinct to lead... Pursue Rabbit!

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

Everything I've done in my life has been by instinct. I never had any doubt I could do anything... I always knew I was going to be a writer.

[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.

Those who have gone through the high school of reporterdom have acquired a new instinct by which they see and hear only that which can create a sensation, and accordingly their report becomes not only a careless one, but hopelessly distorted.

I think the American Western laid down a kind of subject matter that's about following your instinct or following your gut and having a sort of removed quality from your humanity. And I think Clint Eastwood helped to establish that.

My own experience is that you get as much information as you can and then you pay attention to your intuition, to your informed instinct.

In your actor's heart, you know when you're playing well. Others may not always agree with you, but I'm always aware of when the scene is cooking or not. You have an instinct about that from years of doing scenes and plays, and I think it stands you in good stead even in the TV world.

One thing we've learned about Donald Trump - this candidate first, president-elect, and now president - is that he has this sort of reptilian instinct for rooting out supposed enemies and finding people he can whip up distrust into rage.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

You have to just go with your imagination, where your instinct takes you.

Don't be bitter and mean 'couse you don’t fit in, it’s a GIFT. Look at you. you’ve got your individuality, you don’t have the herd instinct, you can read Neitzsche and understand it. Only dumb people are happy.

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.

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.

I think you always have to go as an artist with instinct, I really do.

In the absence of certainty, instinct is all you can follow.

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

I think children need to be nurtured for what they are as opposed to what you want them to be. I think that's when those ideas come into your head of like, What should I feel in this moment? It's because someone told you, "Your instinct was incorrect." And you're like, Why? Why is that wrong?

I'd love to do a romantic comedy. And perhaps, if the character was right and I had a good gut instinct, a Bollywood movie. And I'd love to direct. One day. I'm learning a lot on the set of 'The Good Wife.'

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

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

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

There's a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.

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

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

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world

The ideal is unnatural naturalness, or natural unnaturalness. I mean it is a combination of both. I mean here is natural instinct and here is control. You are to combine the two in harmony. Not if you have one to the extreme, you'll be very unscientific. If you have another to the extreme, you become, all of a sudden, a mechanical man No longer a human being. It is a successful combination of both. That way it is a process of continuing growth.

He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct.

As a kid, in the Runaways, I would see the interviewers start to ask about our personal lives and what we did — and I could see the look in their eyes. They were practically frothing at the mouth. So if I answered these questions, I knew they were never gonna talk about the music. It was like that instinct — don’t go there, man. Have boundaries. Have mystery. You don’t have to let everybody in! I want to be singing to everybody, and I want everybody to think that I’m singing to them. Guys, girls and everyone in between.

And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person's most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don't know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate.

Guitar is just something I can do. So much of it now is muscle memory, just instinct.

Thirteen years after Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is now in London, and is going out with a footballer played by Stan Collymore, of all people. On the rebound from John Motson, perhaps. It is difficult to convey just how uproariously awful this movie is, all of the time.