Top 100 Instinctive Quotes
#1. Back through the ages of barbarism and civilization, in all tongues, we find this instinctive pleasure in the imitative action that is the very essence of all drama.
George Pierce Baker
#2. Because animals seem to dwell in the present moment,
because their own presence is so instinctive,
their attention so unwavering, the offer us
a different kind of compassion than humans do.
Anyone is lucky to have both human and
animal comfort in their lives.
Brenda Peterson
#3. Religions which have any very strong hold over men's actions have generally some instinctive basis.
Bertrand Russell
#4. Had she been a more instinctive, "natural" cook, she might have felt less compelled to parse each recipe, to tackle each one as though getting it right were a matter of life and death.
Karen Karbo
#5. When a women speaks her truth, fires up her intention and feeling, stays tight with the instinctive nature, she is singing, she is living in the wild breath-stream of the soul.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#6. I want to try and be instinctive as a writer and director.
Andrea Arnold
#7. And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
William Gibson
#8. When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider's nature. It's instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive?
Joseph Campbell
#9. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.
Rachel Joyce
#10. The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.
George Stillman Hillard
#11. It seems that these phenomenal feats that race car drivers are performing are instinctive. They [require] very little mental workload.
Chris Gerdes
#12. I was looking to be pale, you know, like the kind of person who has that pigment in their skin where no matter what the weather is they have pink cheeks. I had a couple of friends like that. But it was all very instinctive in a way. I never really thought that much about it.
Paul Reubens
#13. Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do
otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to
do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.
George Orwell
#14. Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can't quite make it all the way up to the brain.
Fredrik Backman
#15. Animals of all classes, old and young, shrink with instinctive fear from any strange object approaching them.
William Henry Hudson
#16. If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist ... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit ... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.
Guillermo Del Toro
#18. An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches with spire steeples which point as with a silent finger to the sky and stars.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#19. Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good ...
Thomas Merton
#20. No matter how much I may love - scratch that, loved, past tense - Josh, I was no dummy. Everyone knows the Y chromosome carries with it the instinctive urge to lie under pressure.
Which, incidentally, was what Josh was going to be under when I found him. Serious pressure.
On his larynx.
Gemma Halliday
#22. Some people say, therefore, that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior.
Jane Goodall
#23. Howard Roark stood as a role model for me - as exactly the way I already was living. Even at that tender age [18] I already felt that. And it was intuitive or instinctive or inbred stubbornness or whatever; but I had already made those choices and suffered for them.
Neil Peart
#24. "Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#25. The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea. Letters came every week
Willa Cather
#26. I actually really love working with young actors because they're so responsive and instinctive, and it's a much less honed craft that they're employing.
Clive Owen
#27. I know when I've been playing a lot of golf it takes me a while to get back into cricket again. It's not so much the different shape of the swings, more the fact that you are stationary when you hit a golf ball. In cricket you have to move forward or back, which is an instinctive timing thing.
Ricky Ponting
#28. Mr. Thwaites was, of course, a pronounced and leading Christmasist, being the instinctive leader of everything irritating and depressing, and the others followed him.
Patrick Hamilton
#29. Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
Ernest Renan
#31. In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age.
William James
#32. A quick and sound judgment, good common sense, kind feeling, and an instinctive perception of character, in these are the elements of what is called tact, which has so much to do with acceptability and success in life.
Charles Simmons
#33. He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.
Edith Wharton
#34. I have the kind of personality that I always look ahead than look at what's happened. It does help a lot, especially when you've done badly or you've failed. It's instinctive of me that I look at what's next, I look ahead a lot, and start preparing for that, in victory and in defeat.
Rahul Dravid
#35. something: scenario x is responded to by action y. Everyone learns it and then practices it until responses are almost instinctive. It's all part of the "train hard, fight easy" philosophy that's central to military life - though veterans of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan smile
Nick Pope
#36. The desire to run comes from deep within us - from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.
George A. Sheehan
#37. How infinitely passionate a thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.
William James
#38. In a really business-run society like the United States, the business elites are deeply committed to class struggle and are engaged in it all the time. They're instinctive Marxists.
Noam Chomsky
#39. Operant conditioning is not confined to deliberate training; it is one way that cats learn how to deal with whatever surroundings they find themselves in. Cats have not (yet) evolved to live in apartments; their instinctive behavior is still tuned to hunting in the open air.
John Bradshaw
#40. The snake who tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit was not the Devil, but her own instinctive nature saying, Honor your hunger and feed yourself.
Terry Tempest Williams
#41. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
George Orwell
#43. I don't read anything about myself. As a child, there was something in me that was just instinctive. I want to be clear in my spirit, and I don't want to be blocked by things that get inside of you and kill you.
Gloria Vanderbilt
#44. A thing that had always struck her about the child was that he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now she realized that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his feelings; he hid himself to weep.
W. Somerset Maugham
#45. Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity.
Coco Chanel
#46. His smile was instinctive. A little bit apology, a little bit politeness. And a little bit of charm because, of all the things he'd expected to come from his trip to the market, meeting a cute girl with messy hair and dirty work gloves had definitely not been one of them.
Marissa Meyer
#47. The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
William James
#48. In every man there is an instinctive and passionate reaction if his person or liberty is attacked.
Arthur Keith
#49. For me, as I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, I became aware of how on an instinctive level I made choices to cover myself.
Rene Auberjonois
#50. The single most instinctive evil is discrimination
Rahul Bose
#51. What must be understood is this: attackers attack as a form of defence. It is their instinctive response to threat, real or perceived. It may be desperate or it may be habit, or both, when desperation becomes a way of life. Behind the assault hides a fragile person.
Steven Erikson
#52. Well, I don't know what Ron has in mind, but I do know about the arc of the show. Looking at how intuitive and instinctive Eddie and I play, that is the sort of thing that leads into sexual chemistry. I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged.
Mary McDonnell
#53. At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze.
Jennifer Birkett
#54. It's more instinctive to want revenge, but we are also capable of immense amounts of forgiveness and love and a compassion that extends even to those who have brutalized us.
Naomie Harris
#55. When I say I'm instinctive [in writing], I do feel like I need to hide what I'm doing from myself. My mind just needs to be able to operate untrammeled.
Brian Evenson
#56. If you're drawing a Western town, you can duplicate that Western town from instinct alone. Some artists may take it from other illustrations or duplicate what you've drawn, but it will never have that gut reality that's instinctive in the artist.
Jack Kirby
#57. The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
Roger Ebert
#58. A man is seldom more manly than when he is what you call unmanned,
the source of his emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are tender and weak.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#59. It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.
Simon Schama
#60. One's sentiments
call them that
one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power.
Elizabeth Bowen
#61. I'm an instinctive actor. I just see the part and play it. I'm more interested in what isn't said - the silences.
Philip Glenister
#62. Our instinctive apparatus consists of two parts- the one tending to further our own life and that of our descendants, the other tending to thwart the lives of supposed rivals.
Bertrand Russell
#63. I am certain that most Germans have instinctive liking for Italy, just as Italians admire Germans for their many qualities.
Mario Monti
#64. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian's action an implied
Julian Barnes
#65. There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs ... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.
Gertrude Stein
#66. If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times.
Oskar Schlemmer
#67. It is the instinctive wish of most American businesspeople, even those unlikely to be directly affected, that General Motors not go bankrupt.
Carol Loomis
#68. There are moments in time when the axis of the universe shifts, when life as you knew it is irrevocably altered. When the hiss and grind of the gears fell silent, some deeply rooted instinctive part of me knew this was one of those moments.
Jennifer Silverwood
#69. Fasting is, I think, a profoundly instinctive form of appeal.
Tana French
#70. When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.
Laura Linney
#71. It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.
Havelock Ellis
#72. It was perfectly instinctive. I knew if I said I was a dancer he'd have made certain assumptions. I've been receiving this response more and more from men. They look me up and down as if they're looking straight through my clothes and it makes my heart beat with rage.
Wendy Buonaventura
#73. I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn't an act of fury, fury isn't part of it anymore. It's more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation.
Steve Erickson
#74. In fact, to be successful at organic beekeeping, it is even more important to learn to work with the natural biological processes and instinctive behaviors of the bees.
Ross Conrad
#75. Art is the instinctive application of the knowledge latent in the subconscious.
Austin Osman Spare
#76. He knew how she would love. He had not loved her without gaining that instinctive knowledge of what capabilities were in her. Her soul would walk in glorious sunlight if any man was worthy, by his power of loving, to win back her love.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#77. We all distrust people we don't know; it's instinctive. This is why to be a Christian demands that we stretch well beyond what is natural, beyond what is instinctive.
Sandhya Rani Jha
#78. Fear in the midst of the storm is instinctive and beneficial. Fear of a storm that could happen is not. It's an intrusive emotion that can lead us to a greatly diminished life.
David Jeremiah
#79. Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.
Kingsley Amis
#80. A guy like Malcolm who makes that type of quick, instinctive plays, that's one of his strong suits. I don't think it surprised any of us players because that's what his skill set is.
Tom Brady
#81. Fashion is instinctive and sensual. Learn to love what you wear. It should feel like eating chocolates ... wi thout the calories
Alber Elbaz
#82. The first reactions are often instinctive. So one of the first things we said was that the Chinese had no right to inspect the plane, and that we had a sovereign right to. I don't know what the legal position is, but it was surely psychologically absolutely the unwise thing to do.
Henry A. Kissinger
#83. I sometimes worried that the more instinctive forms of love were not so available to you. That easy maternal devotion, for instance, that seemed so natural in some women, and which, as we spoke of from time to time, was something you had to struggle to feel. [p. 189]
Sue Miller
#84. Pretenders try to out-think their opponents as if they were playing chess. Tennis is a martial art. Instinctive fluid action is far more effective than thinking.
Anonymous
#85. I don't know the nuts and bolts of writing. I studied medicine. I was a pre-med nerd. So everything I learned, I know about writing is very instinctive.
Khaled Hosseini
#86. You'd think walking should be the simplest thing," she said at last. "Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are." She wet her lower lip with
Rachel Joyce
#87. At best an autistic spectrum child may learn what's expected of him, and how to relate to those about him, but it never becomes instinctive. Even a high-functioning adult will sometimes use inappropriate language, conversation or behavior.
Sara Elliott Price
#89. I was working more on a primal, instinctive level. And it just seemed to suit me; it seemed to suit my concentration span, it seemed to suit my personal style of performance, and I have fallen in love with film acting.
Ron Perlman
#90. I'm instinctive. I'm still learning how to run the ball. What I've done may look good to everyone else, but I know I'm capable of more than I've shown.
Clinton Portis
#91. The best acting is instinctive. It's not intellectual, it's not mechanical, it's instinctive.
Craig MacDonald
#92. Man must get his thoughts, words and actions out of this vast moral jungle. We are not predators. We are, hopefully, more than instinctive killers and selfish brutes. Why take such a dim view of our potentialities and capabilities?
H. Jay Dinshah
#93. Nothing perhaps has so retarded the reception of the higher conclusions of Geology among men in general, as ... [the] instinctive parsimony of the human mind in matters where time is concerned.
Charles Lapworth
#94. I'm hopeless at playing scales. Try and be instinctive first and analytic afterwords, although it's good to study the theory of music.
Brian May
#95. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
George Orwell
#96. I think my water just broke.'
I took an instinctive step back. Because, gross. 'Omigod.
Kieran Scott
#97. So I am totally aware that when I defend the autonomy of art I'm going counter to my own development. It's more an instinctive reaction, meant to protect the private aspect of the work, the part I am most interested in and which nowadays is at risk in our culture.
Thom Mayne
#99. Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?..Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission?
Erich Fromm
#100. I can get onstage and cut that off and be superinstinctive. To be a good live performer, you have to be instinctive. It's like, to walk in the jungle, or to do anything where there's a certain tightrope wire aspect you need to be instinctive. And you have to be comfortable at it also.
Bruce Springsteen
