Top 100 Quotes About Instinct
#1. Most cats feel that bird-catching is their duty; the instinct goes back to prehistoric times. Amber keeps in practice by chasing moths.
Gladys Taber
#2. The Revolution in the United States was produced by a mature and thoughtful taste for liberty, and not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#3. People with a lot of money don't dress as well as people who have to make do, who have to be inventive. Those are the people who are always more interestingly dressed, I think. Everything I do, I do with gut instinct. If I think too much, it won't come out right.
Iris Apfel
#4. What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#5. Is there any depression so deep as this? is there any night so dark as this first eclipse of the soul, this first conscious stilling of the instinct for right?
John Meade Falkner
#6. Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.
John Sterling
#7. This watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man's fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form.
Tana French
#8. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.
Stephen Crane
#9. No one has any license to brag because he is honest. That should be natural instinct and, besides, if you are not, they put you in jail. Honesty is merely a form of insurance.
Charles Comiskey
#10. When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. p.276
M.L. Stedman
#11. I have a natural instinct to feel guilty and that I've let people down. I've apologized in more songs than 'Back to the Shack.' Going back to our second record, the closing lines are 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' It's definitely part of my personality.
Rivers Cuomo
#12. Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.
Steven Pinker
#13. My life isn't theories and formulae. It's part instinct, part common sense. Logic is as good a word as any, and I've absorbed what logic I have from everything and everyone ... from my mother, from training as a ballet dancer, from Vogue magazine, from the laws of life and health and nature.
Audrey Hepburn
#14. A recurring theme in the book is instinct versus articulation. Although teen services people may know and understand issues on an instinctive level, they must be prepared to articulate these ideas in the face of threats to teen services.
Jennifer Velasquez
#15. What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.
Ovid
#16. Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
Bertrand Russell
#17. Someone might have a germ of talent, but 90 percent of it is discipline and how you practice it, what you do with it ... Instinct won't carry you through the entire journey. It's what you do in the moments between inspiration.
Cate Blanchett
#18. 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
#19. All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.
Hilaire Belloc
#20. My natural instinct after doing something shameful is not to rush into the street boasting about it but to put on dark glasses and head for the next county, hoping nobody notices I've been in the neighborhood.
Russell Baker
#21. He shot everything that moved in a blind fury. It was as if he were floating outside his body, his flesh acting on pure animal instinct. To kill or be killed. It was exhilarating.
Rebecca M. Gibson
#22. With our instinct we can go everywhere, but with our intelligence we will get there.
Jan Jansen
#23. When your safety is in question follow your intuition. It will help you balance along the precipice between vulnerability and adventure.
Gina Greenlee
#24. I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Alan Bennett
#25. Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.
Lillian Hellman
#27. I haven't written in a week. It's like holding your breath under water. You feel an awful constriction and then the instinct to propel yourself.
D.A. Botta
#28. Fear is an instinct, like hunger or anger. We need it to help us survive, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. It lets us know whether we should fight or flee.
David Clement-Davies
#29. We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#31. My finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes that they should be paying higher taxes.
Barack Obama
#32. A successful politician must not only be able to read the mood of the public, he must have the skill to get the public on his side. The public is moved by mood more than logic, by instinct more than reason, and that is something that every politician must make use of or guard against
Jean Chretien
#33. That form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves ...
Marcel Proust
#35. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.
Duke Ellington
#36. Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her; she knows by a process of the intellect; but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin's lot.
Arnold Bennett
#37. Now I know. If God himself stood before me and said, "Give me that child, that I might slaughter him," I would tell him, "BITE ME!
Julie McGalliard
#38. Being able to escape to a dreamland was a survival instinct for me.
Mia Sheridan
#39. You have to follow your instinct, and that's what I've tried to do all my life, whether in music or anything.
Erol Alkan
#40. In martial arts, the way that they train really does channel that killer instinct. We used to put motorcycle helmets on and go full force at each other with these sticks to train.
Jose Pablo Cantillo
#41. Then he said, "Always follow your first instinct about a person, baby girl, and you won't go wrong." At first I didn't understand what he meant. So I asked him. He just told to me to be careful of whom I trust. Make sure that the people you keep close to you are worthy of the trust you give them.
Sha Cole
#42. If we allow ourselves even for a moment to contemplate the vast weight of suffering in the world, we will easily be overwhelmed with grief. This is why we develop the habit and self-protective instinct of overlooking the suffering around us.
Thabiti M. Anyabwile
#43. If an animal does something, we call it instinct. If we do the same thing for the same reason, we call it intelligence.
Will Cuppy
#44. I've always believed that acting is instinct to start with; you either have it or you don't.
Claudette Colbert
#45. I have no maternal instinct whatsoever. Motherhood holds no interest for me.
Helen Mirren
#46. With the truest instinct of my kind, I'd bound myself securely into the body's center of thought, twined myself inescapably into its every breath and reflex until it was no longer a separate entity. It was me.
Stephenie Meyer
#47. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
Carl Sagan
#48. A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Lynn Abbey
#49. There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child - and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.
Robert Breault
#50. Because I didn't go to drama school, I didn't start in the business with any toolbox apart from enthusiasm and instinct. I'd throw everything at a part and sometimes realise that I had hit my limits.
Hattie Morahan
#52. Love between a man and a woman is founded on the mating instinct and is not free from desire and self-seeking. But to have a friend and to be true under any and all trials is the mark of a man!
Charles Eastman
#53. A man in cahoots with a woman's sexual instinct was the devil himself, for he had the united power over her - himself and her own longing - greater than a mere man
Judith Ivory
#54. Why did you save Mahmoud?" Killian's voice was so low she almost didn't hear him.
"Instinct," she muttered sleepily. "I certainly wasn't about to save you"
His laugh vibrated through his leg, through her body. "Of course not. Mahmoud's grateful.
Anne Stuart
#55. I've always been one to take chances and I've always been one to, to create or follow through with instincts.
Teddy Pendergrass
#56. The varieties of religious belief are an advantage, since all faiths are good, so far as they encourage us to lead a religious life. The more sects there are, the more opportunities there are for making a successful appeal to the divine instinct in all of us.
Swami Vivekananda
#57. I don't know why I am in such a reminiscent mood except that spring and the reappearance of toads always awakens the old acquisitive instinct. The only thing that keeps me from starting a collection is the fact that no rule exists against it.
Jean Webster
#58. What we call patriotism, in other words, is a calculable force which, released by a predictable situation, will animate man in a manner no different from other territorial species.
Robert Ardrey
#59. 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
#60. Instinct's aware of reflex when mind ain't yet.
Toba Beta
#61. Love is the path that guides the men to the fields of infinite LIGHT!
Dave Zebian
#62. The instinct of worship is still so strong upon us that, having nearly worn out our capacity for treating kings and such kind of persons as sacred, we are ready to invest a majority of our own selves with the same kind of reverence.
Auberon Herbert
#63. Acting is just a process of relaxation, actually. Knowing the text so well and trusting that the instinct and the subconscious mind, whatever you want to call it, is going to take over.
Anthony Hopkins
#64. My mother used to tell me that when push comes to shove, you always know who to turn to. That being a family isn't a social construct but an instinct.
Jodi Picoult
#65. I'd love to do a romantic comedy. And perhaps, if the character was right and I had a good gut instinct, a Bollywood movie. And I'd love to direct. One day. I'm learning a lot on the set of 'The Good Wife.'
Archie Panjabi
#66. Hardly any one is able to see what is before him, just as it is in itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.
Arthur Symons
#67. There's a lot of research behind the scenes that you don't get to see, but I have an instinct that my dad nurtured from when I was born. I was very lucky then.
Steve Irwin
#68. She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.
Louisa May Alcott
#69. Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.
Clarence Darrow
#70. In tears I tossed my coin from Trevi's edge. A coin unsordid as a bond of love
And, with the instinct of the homing dove, I gave to Rome my rendezvous and pledge. And when imperious Death Has quenched my flame of breath, Oh, let me join the faithful shades that throng that fount above.
Robert Underwood Johnson
#71. I think comedy's something you can't learn. It's an instinct, which makes it rather elusive.
Julie Walters
#72. Beware instinct
the lion will not touch the true prince.
Instinct is a great matter.
William Shakespeare
#73. The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#74. There is an instinct that emerges when we get quiet with people. We know who's close.
John O'Donohue
#75. I'm a mathematician by education, but I have this other thing. A gut instinct.
Glen Taylor
#76. Gut instinct said she was bound to be up to her neck in trouble. She always was. Gut instinct was right
Shehanne Moore
#77. Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.
Siri Hustvedt
#78. I've done so many movies with first-time directors, and honestly I just go with gut instinct. People that usually can tell me a good story, and talk to me about why the movie is the movie they want to make. I just go with my gut.
Neal H. Moritz
#79. Intuition is the wisdom formed by feeling and instinct - a gift of knowing without reasoning ... Belief is ignited by hope and supported by facts and evidence - it builds alignment and creates confidence. Belief is what sets energy in motion and creates the success that breeds more success.
Angela Ahrendts
#80. Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.
Agatha Christie
#81. The herd instinct is the new chic! It's like belonging to a club! ...
Eugenia Sheppard
#82. There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.
Peter Benchley
#83. Erudite and entertaining, Max Anderson is the perfect tour guide to the world of art. The Quality Instinct is both educational and enlightening from start to finish, the thinking person's guide to museums. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to truly understand what makes a masterpiece.
Daniel Silva
#84. My dear Watson, you were born to be a man of action. Your instinct is always to do something energetic.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#86. His herding instinct is so strong that he confuses tractors on a baseball field for sheep. He was hospitalized twice. Once by a line drive and once for attacking a tractor tread.
Tom Hayden
#87. As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.
- (1772-1834)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#88. I didn't know how to tell him that I hadn't lost the instinct to survive and yet at the same time I didn't feel much need for self-preservation, that somehow there was a distinction between the two.
Jane Hamilton
#89. I've never felt so bereft and panicky. What do I do without my phone? How do I function? My hand keeps automatically reaching for my phone in its usual place in my pocket. Every instinct in me wants to text someone, 'OMG, I've lost my phone! ' but how can do that without a bloody phone?
Sophie Kinsella
#90. You are a man with a protective instinct. To care that deeply is a blessing. But like most blessings, it can also be a curse.
Louise Penny
#91. Those who have gone through the high school of reporterdom have acquired a new instinct by which they see and hear only that which can create a sensation, and accordingly their report becomes not only a careless one, but hopelessly distorted.
Hugo Munsterberg
#92. Blame someone else, that's always your first instinct. And if you can't blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn't a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.
Julian Barnes
#93. The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.
Robert A. Heinlein
#94. Learn to let your intuition-gut instinct-tell you when the food, the relationship, the job isn't good for you (and conversely, when what you're doing is just right).
Oprah Winfrey
#95. The best decisions aren't made with your mind, but with your Instinct.
Lionel Messi
#96. 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
#97. I believe that instinct is what makes a genius a genius.
Bob Dylan
#98. It's amazing how sudden the effect is - it must be the result of a deep atavistic mating urge buried inside us. A glance and you think: 'Yes, this is the one, this one is right for me.' Every instinct in your body seems to sing in unison.
William Boyd
#99. Your words don't match your vibe,
& im trusting my gut this time.
Nikki Rowe
#100. I graciously survived depression, mental-illness and attempt of suicide.
Lailah Gifty Akita
