Top 100 Quotes About Human Instinct
#1. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
Carl Sagan
#2. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It
Mark Twain
#3. We adapted to being at war, just as we had adapted to the chaos and upheaval of revolution. How amazing and yet tragic it is, I thought, the human instinct for
Shirin Ebadi
#4. there is something in us from God that knows we are not alone in the universe, and that we were not meant to go it alone. Prayer is a natural human instinct.
Timothy J. Keller
#5. The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives.
Terence Kealey
#6. To make laws is a human instinct that arises as soon as food and shelter have been ensured, among all peoples, everywhere.
Rebecca West
#7. The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.
Kenneth Grahame
#8. What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.
Antony Beevor
#9. There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'
Timothy Keller
#10. It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.
Johann Hari
#11. To stand against a crowd would take something more than ordinary courage; something that went beyond human instinct.
Diana Gabaldon
#12. Sometimes I have to remind myself to breathe. You would think it would be an innate human instinct but no, i inhale and forget to exhale and so I find my body rigid, all tensed up, heart pounding , chest tight with an anxious head wondering what's wrong.
Cecelia Ahern
#13. At a deep psychological level, convincing young people that they will get the respect, admiration, love that they are looking for through consumerism is a manipulation of a deep human instinct to want to belong.
Helena Norberg-Hodge
#14. I understand the human instinct to want to create a nest and possess things, to show them off, but for me personally, it became less and less interesting.
Nicolas Berggruen
#15. It's a perfectly human instinct to want to be near water.
Stone Gossard
#16. I have always liked coming home and sharing what has happened that day with my loved ones. I like comparing notes. I know other people do, too. I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.
Sarah Kay
#17. There's some human instinct which makes a man treasure what he is not to make any use of, because everybody does not possess it.
Mark Twain
#18. I think we all want to find the love of our life and live our fantasies. What art student hasn't used his art to get girls? What journalists or actors haven't used their craft as well? It's a very human instinct to pursue.
Max Minghella
#19. How can you defy fear? Fear 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 this fear.
Shirin Ebadi
#20. If we listen human instinct actually tells us what we need, but advertising makes us want things we don't need and things we can't have.
Kit Williams
#22. I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification.
I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo)
Jeff Garvin
#23. You always want to know what happened before you. It's a human instinct to know where you came from and what preceded you.
Russell Freedman
#25. There is an art to living that is far above the base human instinct of survival. I want to live beautifully.
Jennie Allen
#26. Fear is a basic human instinct and an indicator of the gravity of a situation. It becomes an asset if it is effectively controlled. It becomes a weakness for a man if he lets it prevail over him.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando
#27. There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.
Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould
#28. Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.
Clarence Darrow
#29. The human race like to do things you are good at and avoid things that they are bad at. Avoiding it is the natural instinct.
Steve Redgrave
#30. So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct.
Carl Jung
#31. People have a need for certainty - and that need for certainty is in every human being, certainty that you can avoid pain, certainty that you can at least be comfortable. It's a survival instinct.
Tony Robbins
#32. Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.
Clarence Darrow
#33. But honest instinct comes a volunteer; Sure never to o'er-shoot, but just to hit, While still too wide or short in human wit.
Alexander Pope
#34. Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.
Philip K. Dick
#35. Regardless of all our pretenses, deep within, we are still unconsciously the same old cave-people.
Abhijit Naskar
#36. Our 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 Dreiser
#37. Religions are not proved, are not demonstrated, are not established, are not overthrown by logic! They are of all the mysteries of nature and the human mind, the most mysterious and most inexplicable; they are of instinct and not of reason.
Alphonse De Lamartine
#39. Human beings are born with the instinct to express themselves through movement. Even before he could communicate with words, primitive man was dancing to the beat of his own heart.
Bob Fosse
#40. Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub?
Mira Jacob
#41. Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.
Susan Sontag
#42. Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.
Graham Greene
#43. He reflected on the decay of mankind-the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto.
D.H. Lawrence
#44. The human form was never [formed] to beget children. This tendency among people to cohabit is nothing but animal instinct inherited from all the previous lives of evolution from the stone to the human form.
Meher Baba
#45. Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren't human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#46. Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately.
Sol Stein
#47. Killing is not so easy as it seems. Most people are wired to be careful of their fellow human beings. Soldiers and cops both are specifically given training to overcome that instinct, and the criminals who fire at other people are usually driven to it by desperation. And
Jim Butcher
#48. Data can bear on policy issues, but many of our opinions about policy are grounded in premises about the nature of human life and human society that are beyond the reach of data.
Charles Murray
#49. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true ... she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.
Willa Cather
#50. The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.
Stefan Zweig
#51. There was the natural human survival instinct to be optimistic.
Barbara Demick
#52. It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.
Matt Ridley
#53. 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
#54. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H.G.Wells
#55. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true.
Andy Weir
#56. The instinct to survive will never change, neither will the human body's amazing ability to endure.
Lofty Wiseman
#57. Intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls ... The genius of the irrational ... This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possess it ... [the] indomitable will to survive.
David Marusek
#58. For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.
Philip Pullman
#59. Hume argued powerfully that human reason is fundamentally similar to that of the other animals, founded on instinct rather than quasi-divine insight into things.
David Hume
#60. Do I know I'm right? Judgments aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I'm like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe.
Tony Blair
#61. As the Maestro is never loath to tell us, a human who suffers from too much ambition succeeds only in exemplifying the Creator's own lack of anticipation. The D.K., wishing His Vision to be innovative, had created the human will as an instinct all but free of Him. Once again, God had miscalculated.
Norman Mailer
#62. In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.
Edvard Grieg
#63. I think that, in almost all human beings, there is buried a profound tribal instinct that makes us very susceptible to being aroused to patriotic fervour.
Adam Hochschild
#64. The relationship between a dog and a human is always complicated. The two know each other in a way nobody else quite understands, a connection shrouded in personal history, temperament, experience, instinct, and love.
Jon Katz
#65. A half-century before Madonna, Gypsy [Rose Lee] understood how to make performance out of desire, how to exploit the very human and eternal instinct to always want most what we'll never have.
Karen Abbott
#66. This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and ... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#67. How, then, find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. By accepting the human condition more simply, and candidly, by dreading troubles less, calculating less, hoping more.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#68. Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, the fear instinct.
Boris Sidis
#69. The oldest story around: Instinct, Emotion, and Habit get the better of human beings.
Apostolos Doxiadis
#70. Technology will never last if it ignores human beings' basic instinct to express and discover through expression.
Lemn Sissay
#71. It was as natural as breathing to all human beings, and to all warm-blooded creatures, for that matter, to wish quick deaths for monsters. This was an instinct.
Kurt Vonnegut
#72. The herd instinct seems to be the strongest human emotion, one that the race is constantly breeding off as the mavericks are liquidated. Happiness is running with the crowd.
John Train
#73. Everyone judges constantly: positively judging one person is the same as negatively judging everyone else; it is to say that that person is superior in some sense.
Criss Jami
#74. I don't think [being monogamous] is a natural instinct for human beings, but it doesn't mean I don't believe in monogamy or true love. I believe in finding a soul mate. Monogamy can be hard work for some people. I don't think it applies to everybody, and I don't think a lot of people can do it.
Scarlett Johansson
#75. I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, and the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#76. Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.
Robert A. Heinlein
#77. The desire for gold is the most universal and deeply rooted commercial instinct of the human race.
Gerald M. Loeb
#78. Like hunger or thirst, the instinct for balance is built into the human body.
Deepak Chopra
#79. Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.
Louis MacNeice
#80. No one has written adequately of what happens when enough of the body's naked surface is pressed against another human being's. It is a slow dismantling of ego, a suspension of the instinct to distinguish Me from Not Me.
Kenji Yoshino
#81. Human beings are much better at breaking up than they are at getting together. The instinct to get together is very powerful, but it doesn't last long.
E. Jean Carroll
#82. The instinct of self-preservation in human society, acting almost subconsciously, as do all drives in the human mind, is rebelling against the constantly refined methods of annihilation and against the destruction of humanity.
Bertha Von Suttner
#83. Satisfying a savage instinct is incomparably more pleasurable than satisfying a civilized one.
Jed Rubenfeld
#84. Humans don't trust anything-because that's their nature. Half of them have gut feelings they continually ignore. It's not their fault. Instinct rarely fits on the pages of a day planner, and even if it did, human beings would manage to complicate the hell out of it.
A.S. King
#85. That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.
Graham Greene
#86. He used to say that it was no wonder if from the human soul, by some higher instinct that does not know what goes on within itself, some utterance emerges not by art but by 'chance' which is in sympathy with the affairs or actions of the inquirer.7
Augustine Of Hippo
#87. Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.
Samuel Johnson
#88. I was a barbarian, tender and full of violence. I translated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one.
Maurice De Vlaminck
#89. It taught me that Clinton's instinct to make this about your life as a citizen, rather than his as a human being, was the right answer to these things.
Paul Begala
#90. Whenever human activity is directed exclusively to the service of the instinct for self-preservation it is called theft or usury, robbery or burglary etc
Adolf Hitler
#91. The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without
Liu Cixin
#92. No one has yet determined the power of the human species ... what it may
perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.
Brian Herbert
#93. I don't even want to win, but I think there's this survival instinct inside all of us that clicks on when we see other people failing. It makes me feel gross and incredibly human.
Julie Murphy
#94. Life had already taught Stephen one thing, and that was that never must human beings be allowed to suspect that a creature fears them. The fear of the one is a spur to the many, for the primitive hunting instinct dies hard -- it is better to face a hostile world than to turn one's back for a moment.
Radclyffe Hall
#95. Nothing is so deceptive as human reasoning, - nothing so slippery and reversible as what we have decided to call 'logic.' The truest compass of life is spiritual instinct.
Marie Corelli
#96. The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.
Aberjhani
#97. It may be that the strongest instinct of the human race, stronger than sex or hunger, is curiosity: the absolute need to know. It can and often does motivate a lifetime, it kills more than cats, and the prospect of satisfying it can be the most exciting of emotions.
Jack Finney
#98. Human's moral compass doesn't work yet
in worlds where the instinct navigates life.
Toba Beta
#99. Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
Honore De Balzac
#100. The charities of life are scattered everywhere, enameling the vales of human beings as the flowers paint the meadows. They are not the fruit of study, nor the privilege of refinement, but a natural instinct.
George Bancroft
