Top 100 The Life Instinct Quotes
#1. The anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct.
Melanie Klein
#2. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
Bill Bryson
#3. I knew that change was coming, the way you know things you can't see, by feeling them; by instinct. The way the bees know everything they know.
Kathe Koja
#4. A dominant wolf's desire to protect was a strong instinct--Samuel was very dominant. Give him an inch, and he'd take over the world--my life, if I let him." ~Mercy
Patricia Briggs
#5. 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
#6. Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it.
Nenia Campbell
#7. Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.
Paul Pearsall
#8. For many years eagerly thought by your enemy to destroying your life, it's all one second of mastery for you to save your life from his deadly plans, for you to survive.
Auliq Ice
#9. Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it
William V. Shannon
#10. It's an amazing feeling to know that life is actually growing inside your body. The first time you see the ultrasound and you see the little bones and you realise that it's part of you and it's in your care is life changing and this sort of protective instinct has taken over.
Halle Berry
#11. I've learned so much from being a mom about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of woman I want to be. Motherhood has taught me mindfulness. If you just parent on instinct, you'll screw your kid up for life. You have to be so mindful.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#12. What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?
Amy Reed
#13. Happy the man who demands no more from life than what life spontaneously gives him and who guides himself with the instinct of cats who seek the sun when there is sun and, when there is no sun, find what warmth they can.
Pessoa, Fernando
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. If you have the guts to do anything,then you better save enough to face the consequences. Becoming bigger than life requires guts & instinct.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
#18. Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
Jonathan Haidt
#19. Just like some people's instinct to photograph is triggered by vacation ... assignments might be that to me and that's why I've built my life around assignments. That was the way to live the photographic life.
Sam Abell
#20. If you rightly see the division, it is simple to understand: unless instinct is available, you will be dead. And unless intuition is available, your life has no meaning - you just drag on. It is a kind of vegetation.
Osho
#21. I'd rather be on the ground than under
To feel the heavy rain and the thunder.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#22. The ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!
Robert Browning
#23. Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#24. 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
#25. Creativity to me is the life force that is in us. It's an animalistic instinct for survival.
Elie Tahari
#27. The Great stories give us the hope and the courage to survive life.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#28. Love is the instinct for creation. If there is no love, there is no humanity.
Debasish Mridha
#29. Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. They don't understand it. They're not old enough to know the first instinct of irritation should be avoided in order to keep an open mind.
Amelia Gray
#40. Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence.
John Le Carre
#42. The most savage and voracious animal never kills to increase his wealth, or open a way to grandeur. It slays to satisfy his hunger, or in a natural defense of his own life, or of those whom he is prompted by instinct to preserve.
Mary Collyer
#43. Be patient and endure the times.
Your glorious days shall come to pass.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#44. You go into this survival instinct mode, when you feel like your life is in jeopardy. I found myself in the bathroom with my taser, which I have 10 of, my panic button and my cell phone. It was the most terrifying experience I've ever had in my life
Emma Roberts
#45. To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
Mikhail Bakunin
#46. The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven.
Montesquieu
#47. to have to combat one's instincts - that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#48. I'd rather be encouraged by an ant to live than taught to doubt by fifty skeptics.
Marty Rubin
#49. Life was complicated, I thought. Not just the living but dealing with the realities and the instinct for order that other people have, that I didn't always grasp.
Peter Akinti
#50. She wanted her life back and that was mainly because of Vadim. She was a man she didn't want to leave. Even if her first instinct had been to flee, the time for running was over. She wouldn't live in fear forever.
Katie Reus
#51. He who discovers the light, discovers life.
He who discovers the dark, discovers death,
Neither are wrong and neither are right; your perception is what will guide your path. Our minds are our tools, our hearts our truth and our instinct our guidance, don't let them fool you.
Nikki Rowe
#52. Love is the sole impulse for creation; and the man who does not have it as the greatest incentive in his life has never developed the real creative instinct. No one can swing out into the Universal without love, for the whole universe is based upon it.
Ernest Holmes
#53. For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.
Doris Lessing
#54. Your intuition won't fail you, the quest dear; is to silence your mind so you can feel your way home.
Nikki Rowe
#56. We can make detours with our mind but we can't distract the truth from our heart.
Nikki Rowe
#59. I think the power of a grandchild is it taps an instinct that people later in life also have towards ... the world of nonprofits or charities. They want to leave a better place.
David Eisenhower
#60. [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
#61. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
Barbara Kingsolver
#62. The longer you resist the calling of your soul the harder it is to find your way back. Intuition isn't instilled in us for nothing, it's the movement inside us that we must listen to if we want the void to vanish.
Nikki Rowe
#63. The spirit finds a way to be born.
Instinct seeks for ways to survive.
Toba Beta
#64. Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.
Rollo May
#65. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.
Henry David Thoreau
#66. 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
#67. As we grow spiritually, God begins to wean us from things that we think we can't live without: things, comfort, the longing for life to 'work.' That's a childish instinct, to say, 'Life has to work the way I want it to work, and now'.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
#68. When instinct speaks, listen to it. It might be the next push you need to reach greater heights.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
#69. It's the irony of woman's life in that she tends to turn her assets to her own detriment in that while her psyche seeks to see her man strong; her instinct tries to weaken him.
BS Murthy
#70. Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
Margaret Atwood
#71. To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. When your safety is in question follow your intuition. It will help you balance along the precipice between vulnerability and adventure.
Gina Greenlee
#76. 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
#77. Everything I do in life is framed through the view of a businessman. That's my instinct. If I go into a pharmacy to buy shaving cream, then I'm going to look for the best deal on shaving cream.
Donald Trump
#78. When there is pain, the animal instinct is 'fight or flight' (i.e., to either strike back or run away) - reflect instead. When you can calm yourself down, thinking about the dilemma that is causing you pain will bring you to a higher level and enlighten you, leading to progress.
Ray Dalio
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. It's the easiest thing in the world to be kind to someone, to show love, to forgive. You are born with this instinct - it should be your first reaction. NOT violence, anger and hatred! That is something we are taught, it's a Choice You Make.
Michelle Horst
#82. When the mother herself kills her son she goes against her own nature, against her own instinct. People talk about 'choice', but when a woman does that, when she destroys the life of her unborn child, then we have arrived at the limit. The level cannot go higher regarding evil.
Jim Caviezel
#83. I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there is no option.
Stephen King
#84. Because one has the animal instinct to seek out the people that suits one - you see people that go on life's journeys and get muddled along the way. If you look at their lives they've always gone with the wrong people ... can you say it's the wrong people - I don't know ...
Charlotte Rampling
#85. I think life is instinct, and I just really go by that. That's one of the things I've learned - to always trust my instinct and it's always served me well.
Lori Goldstein
#87. 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
#88. His first fatherly instinct ripped through his body when he realized with absolute clarity that he would lay down his life without the slightest hesitation if his daughter could just have lived.
Ashley York
#89. Why is it that fools always have the instinct to hunt out the unpleasant secrets of life, and the hardiness to mention them?
Emily Eden
#90. What is life, except an ongoing instinct for survival? Nature uses that instinct to make us perform; otherwise we would all relax, and the species would disappear. Nature is a cruel green mother. The survival instinct is a goad, not a privilege.
Piers Anthony
#91. I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars.
Karen Russell
#92. In life, when stuff happens the instinct is to close off your heart. By leaving your heart open, it leaves room for someone else to come in.
Jane Seymour
#93. Sometimes in the ignorance I feel the meaning Invincible invisible wisdom, And I commune with intuitive instinct With the force that made life be And since it made life be It is greater than life And since it let extinction be It is greater than extinction. I commune with feelings more than prayer
Sun Ra
#94. The whole life of instinct serves the one end of bringing about death.
Sigmund Freud
#95. It is just as important to set apart time for the development of our aesthetic faculties as for cultivating the money-getting instinct. A man cannot live by bread alone. His higher life demands an impalpable food.
Orison Swett Marden
#96. Yes I believe a man will compliment my life oneday, but what's the rush.. I mean everyone's searching so passionately for something to fill the void and I don't want any part in that, I'm happy finding my own way untill I get swept of my feet.
Nikki Rowe
#97. 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
#98. We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life ... We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence
Mikhail Bakunin
#99. I've never lived my life by the expectations society puts on you. When something doesn't feel right or isn't going the way it should, I listen to my instincts and change it.
Fatima Robinson
#100. 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
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