Top 95 Self Instinct Quotes
#1. Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.
John Sterling
#2. 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
#3. That form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves ...
Marcel Proust
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. But, alas, that was crap. She'd been had by a con man - simple as that. His modesty had been a way to cover up his true self. Call it instinct or women's intuition or going with your gut - whenever Wendy had done that, she had been wrong. "I
Harlan Coben
#10. As you consider your next move, practice this definition of trust: the willingness to take steps while simultaneously waiting for "instructions.
Gina Greenlee
#11. The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation - until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.
Woodrow Wilson
#12. [Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.
Rose Macaulay
#13. Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.
H.G.Wells
#14. My brother has absolutely no sense of self-preservation or survival instinct," Eli said. "He has no idea we're out here. We could be silver-eating, flesh-regenerating, vampire zombies, and when we busted through the door to eat his brilliant brain, he'd look up and say, 'Huh?
Faith Hunter
#17. Conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority.
Dennis Lehane
#18. She likes the bad boys the ones that are bad for her. Maggie is SELF-DESTRUCTIVE. She has the love instinct and the death instinct and they are in an eternal cage match inside her head. This
Kate Zambreno
#19. He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.
Evelyn Waugh
#21. 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
#22. No one could have called Mr. Standen quick-witted, but the possession of three sisters had considerably sharpened his instinct of self-preservation.
Georgette Heyer
#23. I was scared before every battle. That old instinct of self-preservation is a pretty basic thing, but while the action was going on some part of my mind shut off and my training and discipline took over. I did what I had to do.
Audie Murphy
#24. Inertia is the most powerful force in business. Things stay just as they are until something - brute force, reason, fear, enlightened self-interest, the survival instinct - effects movement.
Patrick G. Riley
#26. First mark of the self-preservative instinct of the great psychologist: he never seeks himself, he has no eyes for himself, no interest or curiosity in himself
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. I accepted the official line so completely that even now, after all I've read and heard, I still have a minute hope that our lives weren't entirely wasted. It's the self-preservation instinct at work.
Svetlana Alexievich
#28. Could the motive be nothing more than simple self-preservation? When you lose the instinct yourself, it's hard to remember how powerful it is for everyone else. He felt himself starting to smile.
Joe Abercrombie
#29. I do not for a moment suggest that Japan should be unmindful of acquiring modern weapons of self-protection. But this should never be allowed to go beyond her instinct of self-preservation. She must know that the real power is not in the weapons themselves, but in the man who wields those weapons
Rabindranath Tagore
#30. An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life.
Jose Marti
#31. Man's strongest instinct is not sex or self-preservation. it's to level the playing field.
Ron Brackin
#32. Marine training is essentially a psychological battle against the instinct for self-preservation.
Nathaniel Fick
#34. I guess because I'm a liberal I think it's not people's natural instinct to be completely self-interested.
Matthew Weiner
#35. Choices, Choices, Choices!
Listen to your instincts; you will make the best-choices.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#36. Self-defense is an act that implies you have something valuable to defend. After the instinct, you begin to wonder. What, specifically, was I aiming to save? What, beyond instinct, makes life worth saving?
Emily Arsenault
#37. Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.
Joe Abercrombie
#38. 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
#39. I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
Julian Barnes
#42. Courage revealed itself in subtle ways, and often in your most vulnerable moments, when fear and the instinct for self-preservation urged you to flee and forsake others.
Kerry Alan Denney
#43. By self-interest, Man has become gregarious, but in instinct he has remained to a great extent solitary; hence the need of religion and morality to reinforce self-interest.
Bertrand Russell
#44. Don't be led by the opinions of others. Listen to your sacred voice.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#45. Faith gives us strength.
Grace gives us power.
Hope gives us anchor.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#46. If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#47. The fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it's definite unifying powers; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises
Martin Buber
#49. With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.
Thorstein Veblen
#50. I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.
Dennis Lehane
#51. Concerning the blindness and bigotry of people, the pleasures of hatred rise superior even to the instinct of self-preservation.
Isaac Asimov
#53. It was true. I wasn't good with liking someone. my instinct was total self-preservation: show no sign of weakness. This was my pathetic way of being shy.
Jennifer Castle
#54. Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, the fear instinct.
Boris Sidis
#55. An animal of only instinct, Johnny Ferret, has in his actions drama, but no theater; theater requires that you draw a circle around the action and observe it from outside the circle; in other words, self-consciousness is theater.
Mary Ruefle
#56. If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#58. if you only let your thoughts go, they can come up with all sorts of things, conjuring up images of anyone at all, making caricatures of even the people that you know and love most.
The self-preservation instinct. Let your subconscious make parodies of your loss and anxiety and jealousy.
Mons Kallentoft
#60. Show me a man who has no interest in his own good, and I'll show you a man who is not in touch with his own humanity."
~R. Alan Woods [2013]
R. Alan Woods
#61. The naive is what is or appears to be natural, individual, or classical to the point of irony or to the point of continuous alternation of self-creation and self-destruction. If it is only instinct, then it is childlike, childish, or silly; if it is only intention, it becomes affectation.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#62. I have experienced deep despair, mental-ill health and attempt of suicide.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#64. Trust your instincts, and make judgements on what your heart tells you. The heart will not betray you.
David Gemmell
#65. The eye of your mind - your intelligence; the eye of your heart - your conscience; and the eye of your soul - your instinct.
Melissa McPhail
#66. Banks have a strong self-preservation instinct and are quick to adapt to new regulations.
Herve Falciani
#67. A biomass will live with a self-preservation instinct
Sunday Adelaja
#68. Untraumatized people have a natural instinct to make healthy decisions in the best interest of their true selves. They are only limited by their immaturity and the brokenness of their external world.
Daniel Mackler
#70. 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
#71. The greatest souls have survived deep distress and mental-ill health.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#72. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.
Hermann Hesse
#74. Morale is not a single instinct. It has many ingredients. A sense of personal responsibility, the natural courage of an individual, the amount of his acquired self-discipline
and above all his interest in others
these together make up the spirit of morale.
Phyllis Bottome
#75. I think that Poe is so resonant because he represents that part of us that is in misery or sorrowful or wants to explore the darkness. He wrote a great story called 'The Imp of the Perverse' about the instinct towards self-destruction. Poe is the godfather of Goth literature and that whole movement.
John Cusack
#76. A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#77. Fear is a healthy instinct, not a sign of weakness. It is a natural self-defense mechanism that is common to felines, wolves, hyenas, and most humans. Even fruit bats know fear, and I salute them for it. If you think the world is weird now, imagine how weird it would be if wild beasts had no fear.
Hunter S. Thompson
#80. Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength
life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#81. there must be instinct on d inside to have an increase on d outside
Ikechukwu Joseph
#82. Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the individual's instinct for self preservation.
Albert Einstein
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#87. When amazing people with an unshakable instinct for survibal put together, they can achieve what might seem impossible to others.
Vishwas Chavan
#88. 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
#90. When a bee stings, she dies. She cannot sting and live. When men sting, their better selves die. Every sting kills a better instinct. Men must not turn bees and kill themselves in stinging others.
Francis Bacon
#91. His (the theologian) basic instinct of self preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#92. One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her and did not leave her until the night closed in catastrophe for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.
Angela Carter
