Top 100 Our Instincts Quotes
#1. In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us.
C. G. Jung
#2. 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
#3. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.
Barack Obama
#4. With morality we correct the mistakes of our instincts, and with love we correct the mistakes of our morals.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#5. Character is the measure of our freedom from the tyranny of our instincts. It is the space we create between our urges and our actions.
Valson Thampu
#6. Men like to share outrageous stories with one another - embellishing the keenness of our instincts and exaggerating the metallic compounds that make up our genitalia, or "brass balls" as they say.
Noah Fregger
#7. What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven't done.
Tom Hurndall
#8. Our instincts may have even guided us to hide parts of ourselves in order to keep them alive when we were younger.
T.D. Jakes
#9. Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.
Bertrand Russell
#10. We inhabit a world where we're taught that we can have what we desire, and tend to act on it - the least we can do is admit to it when we succumb to our instincts.
Mariella Frostrup
#11. Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture.
Sigmund Freud
#12. But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.
Albert Einstein
#13. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.
Margaret Fuller
#14. 'Stimela' is the very first video I directed. I wanted it to be an emotional visual art piece, displaying humans as free, powerful animals. We are all running from something or searching for something; our instincts have been ignored.
Wynter Gordon
#15. Our instincts weren't built to handle the kind of power our species wields over the planet, nature has been playing rough with us for so long, maybe it is no surprise we are being so rough with her now.
Dan Riskin
#16. The great thing about homo sapiens is that we've got a brain that can override our instincts. If we want it to.
Graeme Simsion
#17. If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
C.S. Lewis
#18. It is important to grasp that boredom is one of the most common - and undesirable - consequences of 'unicameralism'. Boredom is a feeling of being 'dead inside'; that is to say, loss of contact with our instincts and feelings.
Colin Wilson
#19. Whenever we need to make a very important decision it is best to trust our instincts, because reason usually tries to remove us from our dream, saying that the time is not yet right. Reason is afraid of defeat, but intuition enjoys life and its challenges.
Paulo Coelho
#20. We all look back at some time or other and wonder why we didn't listen to our instincts. Why did we hestiate? Why did we lose our dreams?
Diane Griffith
#21. If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
Bruce Chatwin
#22. Since the Fall, our instincts have been to withdraw from relationship when we're in trouble, when we most need other people. (Remember
Henry Cloud
#23. What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#24. How ironic it is that our instincts often run exactly opposite from what we truly desire for those we love.
R.A. Salvatore
#25. Our reading is always urged on by the instinct to complete what we read, which is, for some reason, one of the most universal and profound of our instincts. You
Julia Briggs
#26. Love is written in our instincts, yet erased by our actions.
Gayle D. Erwin
#27. We feel encouraged to go further with our instincts, not to change ourselves for love. If I were yours and you were mine, I would want you to be exactly as you are. I would never eclipse you with my desires.
Lauren Kate
#28. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
C.S. Lewis
#29. We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Elvis Costello
#30. You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
Lorrie Moore
#31. We trusted our instincts, and stuck to the two tenets of my philosophy: Sell things for more than you pay for them, and save more than you spend. Simple, yes, but that is the philosophy that ultimately led to a really big business.
Sophia Amoruso
#32. If values are vague, and if they are always too broad for the concrete and specific case that we are considering, the only thing left for us is to trust our instincts.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#33. Imagine how fluid life would be if we each had an advisor who, with our best interest at heart, provided clear, objective and decisive guidance. When we trust our instincts, we do.
Gina Greenlee
#34. Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
George Bernard Shaw
#35. We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs ... We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become.
Brandon Mull
#36. One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#37. WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?
Terry Tempest Williams
#38. Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Emile M. Cioran
#39. The author says we enlist reasons to convince others to join the direction of our instincts.
Jonathan Haidt
#40. We come into this world crying and calling, wailing and singing; and for the first months of our life all our needs and instincts, our dissatisfactions and discoveries are immediately vocalized without apology and without censor.
Paul Newham
#41. 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
#42. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
Charles Dudley Warner
#43. 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
#44. There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts,we long to know about them.
Barbara Pym
#45. 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
#46. We've been trained since kindergarten: Be nice, be kind, share, put on a smile. So we're conditioned to squash our natural selfish instincts, and that's the right thing for society.
Bryan Cranston
#47. What the media are telling you to be afraid of are the wrong things ... Fear is a necessary ingredient of our survival instincts.
Michael Moore
#48. Hate's a growing thing like anything else. It's the inevitable outcome of forcing ideas onto life, of forcing one's deepest instincts; our deepest feelings we force according to certain ideas.
D.H. Lawrence
#49. Most of all, learning to fail well means overcoming our natural instincts to blame someone - maybe ourselves - whenever something goes wrong.
Megan McArdle
#51. We have learned that the satisfaction of instincts cannot be the sole aim of our lives.
Alcoholics Anonymous
#52. In the developed world, hundreds of millions of us now face the bizarre problem of surfeit. Yet our brains, instincts, and socialized behavior are still geared to an environment of lack. The result? Overwhelm - on an unprecedented scale.
Martha Beck
#53. Civilization is a myth. That is the truth this world has taught us. We have not risen above our baser instincts... That is what always has and always will drive us.
Robert Kirkman
#54. Ultimately our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment - originating in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.18
Jonathan Haidt
#55. The creative instincts, the love force must be nourished with every beat of our hearts until they overbalance the destructive instincts.
Gladys Taber
#56. I can't believe that our body, composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of the pig or the crab-louse, contains anything pure and immaterial
Gustave Flaubert
#57. The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
C. G. Jung
#58. But we live on the cusp of a Renaissance in consciousness of who we truly are and, thus, we can now begin to thrive in this exciting age of our humanity's journey toward a greater life and a more fundamentally intelligent evolution of our species.
Martha Char Love
#59. To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.
Emile M. Cioran
#60. Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.
Andrew O'Hagan
#61. What we think of as our "gut instincts" are really a very complex mosaic of past experiences, deep-seated hopes, fears, desires.
Lisa Unger
#62. I am filled with hatred for money, for battleships, for industry, for factories, for the grind, grind, grind of the machine on all our creative instincts ...
Dora Russell
#63. In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.
Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.
Chitralekha Paul
#64. But there are thoughts we think in the forward part of our brains, and then there are those whose origins are much deeper, in the animal part, the part that remembers the terrors of the open savanna at night, the oldest part that was there before the primordial voice that spoke the words I AM.
Rick Yancey
#65. Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.
Jack D. Zipes
#66. 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
#67. To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character - all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.
Fernando Pessoa
#68. 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
#69. As the waters of life wash over us, we lose our sharp corners, and that can be good or bad...trust your instincts, remember your 'secret pacts' and reclaim the wisdom you have always had
Daniel Gottlieb
#70. Dum walks backwards, talking to us. We're going back to high school where our survival instincts are at their finest.
Susan Ee
#71. As we grow older, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves.
Henry David Thoreau
#72. On the one hand, people think they own kids; they feel that they have the right to tell the kids what to do. On the other hand, people envy kids. We'd like to be kids our whole lives. Kids get to do what they do. They live on their instincts.
David Duchovny
#73. We make very little progress when we strive to conquer baser instincts in a good mood. However, vast strides are possible when we are miserable and work with ourselves to replace our misery with joy and understanding.
Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
#74. To be clear, I worry as much about the impact of the Internet as anyone else. I worry about shortening attention spans, the physical cost of sedentary 'surfing' and the potential for coarsening discourse as millions of web pages compete for attention by appealing to our base instincts.
Andrew Weil
#75. Fear brings out the basest instincts," writes British political scientist Sue Goss, "and narrows our sense of belonging to self-preservation."16
Diana Butler Bass
#76. What worries me is that we want to close down our relationship to the world at large. In other words, people's instincts are overwhelmed by the amount of images, or they can't distinguish anymore between Rwanda or Bosnia or Somalia.
Susan Meiselas
#77. 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
#78. Never yet were the feelings and instincts of our nature violated with impunity; never yet was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#79. Our intellect, our awareness, and our consciousness is the most powerful form of life on this planet. It's totally worthwhile. If our animal instincts stopped, we would die. We don't think about it, but if your consciousness were responsible for all of your bodily functions, you would die.
James McAvoy
#80. The horror genre gets you in touch with our primal instincts as a people more than any other genre I can think of. It gives you this chance to sort of reflect on who we are and look at the sort of uglier side that we don't always look at, and have fun with that very thing.
Drew Goddard
#81. The day people will start using their learner's instincts instead of the survival instincts in the education, our society will no longer be a place where education kills your knowledge.
Ameya Agrawal
#82. I'm inclined to think that, after a certain age, our tastes, instincts and inclinations harden like concrete.
David Nicholls
#83. Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.
Horace Mann
#84. 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
#85. Our human nature is profoundly phototropic. Men obey their deepest instincts when they hold fast to light.
Gyorgy Kepes
#86. There must be freedom while we are still very young - not freedom to do what we like, but freedom to understand very deeply our own instincts and urges.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#87. Nonetheless, we experience a sense of freedom when we feel that we have the ability to make choices and satisfy our primal instincts.
Ori Hofmekler
#88. 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
#89. September 11 is one of our worst days but it brought out the best in us. It unified us as a country and showed our charitable instincts and reminded us of what we stood for and stand for.
Lamar Alexander
#90. Prayer is the way that all the things we believe in and that Christ has won for us actually become our strength. Prayer is the way that truth is worked into your heart to create new instincts, reflexes, and dispositions.
Timothy Keller
#91. Not judginess, but openness and curiosity are our proper business. I'm still trying to educate myself. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do.
John Updike
#92. We all bullet point our triumphs, but I am who I am because of everything you don't see on my CV. The stuff that doesn't work out teaches you how to trust your instincts and adapt.
Aimee Mullins
#93. The idea here is that we are less wicked than we are weak. As sarx - as mortal animals - we are playthings of the devil, who uses the fear of death to push and pull our survival instincts (our fleshly, sarx-driven passions) to keep us as "slaves to sin.
Richard Beck
#94. It's amazing how many times we need to go against our survival instincts to survive.
Susan Ee
#95. Today is felt to be the most complicated day in our lives and rarely in trying to deal with the issues of today, are we aware of the impact of the past on those issues.
Martha Char Love
#96. Passion, rage - no matter how much we evolve, man can't escape these instincts: our heritage as beasts. We can only hope to control the beast inside us.
A.G. Riddle
#97. We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#98. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.
Alan Weisman
#99. We have these instincts which defy all our wisdom and for which we never can frame any laws ... They are powers which are imperfectly developed in this life, but one cannot help the thought that the mystery of this world may be the commonplace of the next.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#100. The worst prejudice we acquire during our youth is the idea that life is serious. Children have the right instincts: they know that life is not serious, and treat it as a game...
Egon Friedell
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