Top 40 Human Instincts Quotes
#1. The feeling of rank is one of the most basic human instincts. To gossip about someone is to elevate yourself above him or her.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#2. It's like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don't you see, that's a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.
Benjamin Percy
#3. Training was one thing, reality another, and no one could be sure that the ancient human instincts of self-preservation would not take over in an emergency.
Arthur C. Clarke
#4. ONE HUNDRED TIMES have I been on the point of embracing
her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness
passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold
of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts.
Do not children touch everything they see?
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#5. The attacks of September 11 - and subsequent acts of terror from London to Madrid to Fort Hood, Texas - embody the most repulsive of human instincts, the will to power at the price of the lives of others.
Jon Meacham
#6. Whether or not we know what we are creating or how we are creating it, when things do not turn out the way we desire, our human instincts drive us to look for someone to blame.
Iyanla Vanzant
#7. Everyone desires relationships and community. Most people want to belong to a cohesive, like-minded group. It staves off loneliness. It promotes identity. These are natural and very human instincts.
Joshua Ferris
#8. The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm is one of the most inveterate of human instincts. -The Decoration of Houses
Edith Wharton
#9. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture - one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce - rather than an articulated body of thought.
Thomas Ligotti
#10. Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature ... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these things abut a person, you can touch him at the core of his being.
William Bernbach
#11. Human ties are the greatest distorters of reality because they tend to conceal man's worst selfish instincts.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#12. Whether at home or abroad, the task of statesman is to work with human nature warts and all, and to draw on instincts and even prejudices that can be turned to good purpose. It is never to try to recreate Mankind in a new image.
Margaret Thatcher
#13. unless an evil thought is born in a twisted mind, human nature is repelled by crime. However, civilization has given us needs, vices and artificial appetites which sometimes cause us to repress our good instincts and lead us to wrongdoing.
Alexandre Dumas
#14. It's the ancient instinct: In times of great danger, be wary of strangers. Trust no one outside your circle. But there's another instinct, far older, as old as life itself, nearly impossible for the human mind to override: Protect the young at all costs. Preserve the future." - Vosch
Rick Yancey
#15. When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past - and about the future only as far as that it is death.
Erich Fromm
#16. Seeds of destruction take root in the human heart, and even among those who long for peace, they call to our darker instincts and urge us to violence.:
Victoria Armour-Hileman
#17. Our human nature is profoundly phototropic. Men obey their deepest instincts when they hold fast to light.
Gyorgy Kepes
#18. Fact is,' he said without any of his usual bonhomie, 'religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.
Salman Rushdie
#19. Satisfying a savage instinct is incomparably more pleasurable than satisfying a civilized one.
Jed Rubenfeld
#20. Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.
Michael Burke
#21. But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.
Joe R. Lansdale
#22. Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.
Scott McCloud
#23. There is no such thing as change, but I would describe it as an alteration.' Change implies transformation, if humanity has instincts and impulses how can we deny the very things that make us human.' If change implies transformation wouldn't that mean we have no impulses and instincts.
Testy McTesterson
#24. It's important to get in the habit of growing as a human being, developing and refining leadership and management skills and entrepreneurial instincts and changing to accommodate the times.
Ivanka Trump
#25. It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carriers of heredity. They are active during life;
Matt Ridley
#26. Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?
Elizabeth Janeway
#28. There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong.
Kay Hooper
#29. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.
Aldous Huxley
#30. You can often give a better description of the fight between people, the essentials of it, by means of fantastic animals, the simple, primitive, naked instincts, than by depicting a specific situation. It is not the human animal we should describe, but ourselves as human animals.
Asger Jorn
#31. As humans, we don't know what we should do. We don't have those instincts like God has given animals. We have to see to know where we are going. It is just a natural human emotion to look for people to emulate.
Tony Dungy
#32. George McGovern, for all his mistakes ... understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon,
Hunter S. Thompson
#33. The thing that I really like is psychology. I love the human mind. I love the choices you make based on your experiences and instincts and your development based on such experiences and so I guess that's why I love acting so much.
Wilmer Valderrama
#34. There was nothing in all Douglas's powerful effort that appealed to the higher instincts of human nature, while Lincoln always touched sympathetic cords. Lincoln's speech excited and sustained the enthusiasm of his audience to the end.
Henry Villard
#35. Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.
Philip K. Dick
#36. What matters is not the features of our character or the drives and instincts per se, but rather the stand we take toward them. And the capacity to take such a stand is what makes us human beings.
Viktor E. Frankl
#37. This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts
would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.
Harold S. Kushner
#38. Human beings weren't designed to handle the amount of stress our modern life loads on us, which makes it difficult to hear our natural parenting instincts. It's almost as if we're forced to parent in our spare time, after meeting the demands of work, commuting and household responsibilities.
Laura Markham
#39. That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?
Jennifer Haigh
#40. Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.
Lauren Oliver
