Quotes About Instinct

I try to follow my instinct as a moviegoer and I do the thing I would love to see it at a movie. I'm like everyone, almost, I go to a movie once a week. I like every kind of film if it’s well made. I’m fine. I’m not a specialist fighting for a genre of film. You just have to follow your instinct.

It is very hard to say where you're going until you get there. That kind of thing is based very much on instinct. As a photographer, one of the most important lessons I have learnt is that you have to learn to listen to and trust your own instinct. It has helped to guide me - this far at least.

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 have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.

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.

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.

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.

Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry.

Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.

Guys can smell desperation. It triggers an instinct in them to run far and fast so they aren't around when a woman starts peeling apart her heart.

If we are to have a culture as resilient and competent in the face of necessity as it needs to be, then it must somehow involve within itself a ceremonious generosity toward the wilderness of natural force and instinct. The farm must yield a place to the forest, not as a wood lot, or even as a necessary agricultural principle but as a sacred grove - a place where the Creation is let alone, to serve as instruction, example, refuge; a place for people to go, free of work and presumption, to let themselves alone. (pg. 125, The Body and the Earth)

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.

The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm.

I remember that, although I was full of fervour, I didn't have the slightest inkling, even at forty, of the deeper side to the movement we were pursuing by instinct. It was in the air!

Instinct taught me 20 years ago to pace a song or a concert performance. That translates into pacing a story, pleasing a reading audience.

When you're on screen with Mads, there's some real fireworks because your character is his intellectual equal. In a way, maybe your character has an instinct as to who this man really is.

Reason is sight. Instinct is touch. Intuition is smell.

On all the walls, wherever walls exist, I will inscribe this eternal indictment of Christianity--I have letters to make even blindmen see.... I call Christianity the single great curse, the single great innermost depravity, the single great instinct of revenge, for which no means is poisonous, secretive, subterranean, small enough--I call it mankind's single immortal blemish.... And we reckon time from the dies nefastus with which this calamity arose--following Christianity's first day!--Why not following its last day, instead?--Following today?--Transvaluation of all values!

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.

My urge to photograph is activated by an almost biological instinct for preservation from disorder. The camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to survive.

Instinct tells me to go to Hannah's, but she doesn't live there anymore and that's when I realize the major difference between my mother and Hannah. My mother deserted me at the 7-Eleven, hundred of kilometers away from home. Hannah, however, did the unforgivable. She deserted me in our own backyard.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. Extract from 'Memories of childhood and youth.'

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

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

People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct.

Do you love your idea? Does it feel right on instinct? Are you willing to bleed for it?

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.

Our thoughts ought by instinct to fly upwards from animals, men and natural objects to their creator. If created things are so utterly lovely, how gloriously beautiful must he be who made them! The wisdom of the worker is revealed in his handiwork.

...the greatest shortage in our society is an instinct to produce. To create solutions and hustle them out the door. To touch the humanity inside and connect to the humans in the marketplace.

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

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.

You don't have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. Let a human being throw the engines of his soul into the making of something, and the instinct of workmanship will take care of his honesty.

Instinct is the most powerful thing you have, and you have to trust it.

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.

Even when a person is frightened by threats into doing something, the threats work only because the person has an instinct of fear. If he has not, or if, though having it, it is under his own control, the threat has no more influence upon him than light has in causing a person to see who has no eyes.

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

Love is the sole impulse for creation; and the man who does not have it as the greatest incentive in his life has never developed the real creative instinct. No one can swing out into the Universal without love, for the whole universe is based upon it.

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.

Children can be the most cruel creatures alive. They have the herd instinct of prejudice against any outsider, and they are merciless in its indulgence.

I love TV now, and 'Modern Family,' but what draws me back to theater is that initial instinct of wanting to be a theater actor. I love the challenge of starting a play and not stopping until you finish. I love the immediacy of trusting your instincts.

When a bee stings, she dies. She cannot sting and live. When men sting, their better selves die. Every sting kills a better instinct. Men must not turn bees and kill themselves in stinging others.

My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.

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

Generally my instinct is to not do biographical movies. I want to build characters and not be locked into playing a part in history.

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.