Popular quotes about Instinct! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 3
Don't you dare underestimate the power of your own instinct. Instinct is a lifesaver for sharks and entrepreneurs alike. Most people can recall times they ignored their gut only to regret it later. Learning to actually listen to your instinct is a great form of self-preservation. It's both incredibly easy and tough at the same time, but worth the effort to master.
Barbara CorcoranWhy, 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.
William ShakespeareAmazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
Peter MatthiessenStories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.
Colum McCannWhy is it that fools always have the instinct to hunt out the unpleasant secrets of life, and the hardiness to mention them?
Emily EdenThere 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.
Paul GauguinFor a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
Carl SaganWhenever I'm done with an album cycle, I still wanna write music. If I'm bored when I'm at home, which never happens, my first instinct is to go to the piano and bang something out.
Avril LavigneThe 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.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelNow, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Philip LarkinI'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.
Ray LiottaWhat can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.
Arthur Conan DoyleI think that the insane desire one has sometimes to bang and kick grumblers and peevish persons is a Divine instinct.
Robert Hugh BensonOur most basic emotional need is not to fall in love but to be genuinely loved by another, to know a love that grows out of reason and choice, not instinct. I need to be loved by someone who chooses to love me, who sees in me something worth loving.
Gary ChapmanI have an instinct for music, or a feeling about it, and I'll have my feelings guide my hands.
Brian WilsonVery 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.'
Albert SchweitzerI 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.
Thu TranGiving in to a shrill instinct, she ran around the side of the building. Butch was marching toward his car as if he were carrying an unstable load, and she rushed to catch up with them. โWait. I need to ask him a question.โ โYou want to know his shoe size or something?โ Butch snapped. โFourteen,โ Wrath drawled. โIโll remember that at Christmas, asshole.
J.R. WardThe things that are reflected back at us, often times, are appealing to a base instinct that's about response as opposed to reflection. So for me, it's important to turn on a piece of information that might interest people, you know, that might interest them in pursuing or researching maybe, or even just thinking about it in that moment as I'm performing it.
Reggie WattsWe should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.
Charles Sanders PeirceChildren know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.
Flannery O'ConnorHuman institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, - the fear instinct.
Boris SidisThe 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.
Hannah ArendtMy 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.
Ang LeeWhen you donโt become fixated on winning the prize or appearing successful, and instead pursue your passions, then you will discover the fulfillment that comes from living by instinct.
T. D. Jakesdoubt is a skill. credulity ,by contrast, appears to be something very like an instinct
Kathryn SchulzThis is me putting it simply; the politicians are one demographic and they see that Arizona is changing. I feel like the only instinct to retain power is to have education favor you. You have this Mexican American program that helps kids take ownership of their race and their power. It threatens the political powers that are in place.
Matt de la PenaOur civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Theodore DreiserMy first instinct was Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) cannot be president of the United States. She needs to lose because it's the thing she wants most on the planet Earth.
David MandelThe religious urge in man is not a mere passing phase in the history of his spiritual development, but the ultimate source of all his ethical thought and all his concepts of morality; not the outcome of primitive credulity which a more "enlightened" age could outgrow, but the only answer to a real, basic need of man at all times and in all environments. In another word, it is an instinct.
Muhammad AsadAn adult who does not understand that a child needs to use his hands and does not recognize this as the first manifestation of an instinct for work can be an obstacle to the child's development
Maria MontessoriWhen I watch species other than my own, their instinct's wisdom is what most impresses and disturbs me.
Charles Lindberghsentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
Rebecca WestLove 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.
Ernest HolmesIn terms of what we share from our lives, I tend to share everything. My instinct would be to share everything.
Alison RosenI 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.
Lawrence SchillerMy first instinct is to push you until you break just to see how hard I have to press.
Veronica RothThe death sentence is a barbaric act . . . It is a reflection of the animal instinct still in human beings.
Nelson MandelaFear is a human instinct, just like hunger. Whether you like it or not, you become hungry. Similarly with fear. But I have learned to train myself to live with the fear.
Shirin EbadiThe animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road.
James ThurberOne should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through oneโs greatest efforts.
Albert EinsteinReverence is the highest quality of man's nature; and that individual, or nation, which has it slightly developed, is so far unfortunate. It is a strong spiritual instinct, and seeks to form channels for itself where none exists; thus Americans, in the dearth of other objects to worship, fall to worshiping themselves.
Lydia M. Child