Top 100 Quotes About Instinct
#1. 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
#2. We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.
Jonathan Sacks
#4. [Nietzsche] attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of another's nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at ease hi his presence
Georg Brandes
#5. An instinct is weakened when it rationalises itself: for by rationalising itself it weakens itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question Why?
Joseph Wood Krutch
#8. And suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.
Ayrton Senna
#9. There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.
Anne Stevenson
#11. I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.
Richard Grant
#12. 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
#13. Aunts are discreet, a little shy / By instinct. They forbear to pry ...
Phyllis McGinley
#14. But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded disobedience ... In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.
Jack London
#15. He had accessorized his life with everything but paternal instinct.
Noorilhuda
#16. Your kids pissing you off is an inborn instinct. It's nature's way of getting you to kick them out when they turn 18!
Okaaay. ~sigh~ Due to the times, you can kick them out between the ages of 28-38. Can someone please dramatically reduce the cost of housing, already?
~SHEESH~
Dakota Dawn
#17. In a generation or two, or maybe sooner, young golfers of true sporting instinct will wonder why all this handling of the ball is necessary. It will seem to them that the game is not as good as it might be.
Robert Harris
#18. 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
#19. Sooner or later the let-loose sidewalk pups will cross the streets. Running, they will run into each other. And sooner or later, as surely as noses drip downward, it will no longer be enough to merely run. They must run against something. Against each other. It is in their instinct.
Jerry Spinelli
#20. Every story I do is about people. It's my survival instinct - one person, one story.
John Branch
#21. A novel must be a rich forest known at the start only by instinct.
Dawn Powell
#22. Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen's faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.
Joe Biden
#23. We always protect our heads, our faces,' he commented as he followed a half-step behind and to her left. It's pure instinct; to shield the eyes. The irony is that the blind have no eyes to protect, and suffer most of their injuries on their legs. But instinct can be blind, too.
Melinda Cross
#24. It can be argued that man's instinct to gamble is the only reason he is still not a monkey up in the trees.
Mario Puzo
#25. Love is the instinct for creation. If there is no love, there is no humanity.
Debasish Mridha
#26. On 'There Will Be Blood,' I was cast at the last minute. I had 3 and a half to 4 days to get ready for the first day. I just went for it, threw myself in there and gave it everything I had. That was just guts and instinct, not a lot of preparation.
Paul Dano
#27. Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.
Charles R. Morris
#29. The instinct of self-preservation and the urge to self-destruction are equally strong in man! The Devil has equal a sway over humanity as God until a time still unknown to us.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#30. Comedy will always be central to what I do, it's just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.
Ben Elton
#31. what people often thought of as instinct, was actually the unconscious brain trying to tell the logical mind that there was something happening which it needed to be aware of.
Scott Chapman
#32. Instinct and study, love and hate;
Audacity-reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's heart,
To wrestle with the angel
Art.
Herman Melville
#33. Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison's.
Dorothy Dunnett
#34. Habit can overcome anything but instinct, and can greatly modify even that.
Horace Mann
#35. The hardest thing about being a parent is watching your kids make mistakes. Our instinct is to protect you. But you're right, Deenie. Sometimes we have to step aside and let you make them anyway. The best we can do is be there when you mess up.
Lisi Harrison
#36. 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
#37. As an instinct told her which way to turn, her wisdom told her that it will be a long path to manifest.
Sarah Pussell
#38. In terms of what we share from our lives, I tend to share everything. My instinct would be to share everything.
Alison Rosen
#39. That lack of value sense would deprive a person from a protective instinct.
Sunday Adelaja
#40. I had this instinct and I just knew it. It was a very strange thing and as soon as I finished recording it, we were all in the studio saying we have something really special here.
Deborah Cox
#41. Oh, fuck the paperwork. The words come from nowhere and on instinct I grab her and push her against the wall. Clasping both her hands, I pin them above her head so she can't touch me, and once she's secure, I twist my other hand in her hair while my lips seek and find hers.
E.L. James
#42. Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!
Peter Matthiessen
#43. 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
#44. It is not an act of bravery to try to save your own village. It is an instinct to protect what you possess. Bravery is when you step in to help when you have nothing to lose.
Gail Tsukiyama
#45. If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.
Virginia Woolf
#46. There was no instinct to pretend - there was only the wish to protect the girl I knew I would love forever.
Jay Crownover
#47. To me, faith is about trusting my instinct when logic tells me I'm an idiot.
Gina Rosati
#48. If God wanted us to act on instinct, we wouldn't have the power of reason.
Jodi Picoult
#49. 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
#50. Man is the only creature with the power to control instinct by his own will, but he is also able to suppress, distort, and wound it - and an animal, to speak metaphorically, is never so wild and dangerous as when it is wounded.
Aniela Jaffe
#51. The karmic cycle, when someone screws up really bad and hurts you. Our first instinct is to hurt back, or refuse to forgive.
Jennifer Probst
#53. One of the things I benefited from when I started this business was that I didn't know anything. I was just instinct with no preconceived notions. This enabled me to learn and change quickly without having to worry about maintaining any kind of status quo, like some of my bigger competitors.
Michael Dell
#54. People instinctively let down their guard when they saw a limp, an illness, a flaw in someone else. Not out of compassion but because it made them feel superior. Stronger. Those people, Gamache knew, did not always last long. It was not a useful instinct.
Louise Penny
#55. Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.
Honore De Balzac
#56. None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.
Luigi Pirandello
#57. Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.
John Ray
#58. My instinct was to win, eliminate anyone who is in competition, destroy my enemy, and move on without any kind of hesitation at all.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
#59. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.
Albert Einstein
#61. Feminism is a political mistake. Feminism is a mistake made by women's intellect, a mistake which her instinct will recognize.
Valentine De Saint-Point
#62. I was thinking about doing another film at the same time, which was the sequel to Basic Instinct and I just had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. You know, I just kind of read the writing on the wall.
Bruce Greenwood
#63. 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
#64. I think there's an instinct to make grotesque horror films that are purely carnal, like the 'Saw' movies.
Amber Heard
#65. It is therefore necessary to prepare the imminent and inevitable identification of man with the motor, facilitating and perfecting an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline, quite utterly unknown to the majority of humanity and only divined by the most lucid mind.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
#66. An 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 Montessori
#67. The skill of a good actor is to make it always seem like you're in that fantastically spontaneous moment. Very often, a stand-up comedian has a different instinct, which is to reinvent. Once you've laid down some material, and made them laugh, you move on and find some new material.
Colin Firth
#68. I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.
Sufjan Stevens
#69. Even when I was rebelling against my father, the point was to follow my own intuition and instinct.
Kangana Ranaut
#70. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.
Leslie Charteris
#71. One's nature comes from within, not from without. The abomination occurs in subverting one's instinct in favor of a rigid code written by others. Trying to force yourself into a role that confounds your spirit will always break you.
Garth Stein
#72. A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.
John Irving
#73. History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
Umberto Eco
#75. Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
Tom Stoppard
#76. Just really, really believe in what you're trying to do. Don't let people alter that. Let people advise you and lead you down paths to make smart business decisions. But trust your instinct and trust that overwhelming drive that made you put all your dreams and everything on the line.
Luke Bryan
#77. Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.
Caleb Carr
#78. Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
Virginia Woolf
#79. In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can't choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.
Octavio Paz
#80. Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage.
Wendell Phillips
#81. Think without thinking, so that you act as if out of instinct and not reason.
Christopher Paolini
#82. Art works to satisfy the instinct and the science works to satisfy the reason.
Thiruman Archunan
#83. If I'd seen a grown man beating a crippled boy, of course I'd intervene. If my father died and left my mother destitute, it's your instinct to take care of her. So when I started to think about it in those terms, it started to make sense to me.
Charlie Hunnam
#84. The voice of protest is the voice of another and an ancient civilization which seems to have bred in us the instinct to enjoy and fight rather than to suffer and understand.
Virginia Woolf
#85. Did you really ever think of me when you were kidnapped? Because I look at all the things you went through, and my first instinct is to shield you from my problems - but sometimes you act like nothing happened to you at all.
Lia Habel
#86. Maybe it's the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.
Cristina Henriquez
#87. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around - it's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. [But] reverse the waterfall as much as possible. Enlist the children in their own upbringing.
Bruce Feiler
#88. Religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development
begun now and ending never.
Anna Julia Cooper
#89. 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
#90. I never think of things rationally or intellectually. I swear, every single decision I make is just instinct and my instincts tend to be accurate.
Neill Blomkamp
#91. You can't learn how to be elegant; you can only learn how to avoid mistakes. The rest is instinct. Elegance is about the way you cross your legs, not the label or the newest clothes from the latest collection.
Carine Roitfeld
#92. The fundamental axiom of economics is the human mercenary instinct. Without
Liu Cixin
#93. Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#94. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#95. Don't you dare underestimate the power of your own instinct.
Barbara Corcoran
#96. Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#97. The instinct of interest is the universal instinct of mankind.
Charles Macklin
#98. There are points in life when you listen to common sense and there are times when you follow instinct; sometimes, you ignore both and just act on belief.
Aden Jamison Leirer
#99. I have an instinct for music, or a feeling about it, and I'll have my feelings guide my hands.
Brian Wilson
#100. When people are out of their comfort zone, it's more dramatic, more prone to have more entertaining experiences, get into fights. That's the dramatic instinct, to move people out of what they know and make them deal with it.
Conor McPherson
