Best 601 quotes in «instinct quotes» category

[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer's views of love are flawed. Love can't be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects of our nature.

Opinions of others may temporary influence your decisions. But you ought to follow your own inner voice.

Our ‘learned instinct’ is also called ‘consciousness’, ‘voice of conscience’, ‘inner voice’ or the ‘voice of the soul’ or simply ‘common sense’. Our conscience is thus not a mystical entity, but something which is developed due to the environment of our upbringing.

Our voice of conscience is the result of our social conditioning, which becomes a ‘learned instinct’. If you feel bad when you lie, it may not be because of the voice of your soul but because you have been taught since your childhood to tell the truth and not to lie. Over the course of time, the need to speak truth sinks into your subconscious mind and become your consciousness and your learned instinct.

People talk about fight or flight? That's nonsense. It's fight and flight.

...play, so far from being "by play," if I may so speak, is a matter of serious moment to the creature. Play is a veritable instinct.

Religion teaches us to fight against our natural instincts but it thrives on them

Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.

Reason. It is no more reliable a tool than instinct, myth or dream. But it has the potential to be far more dangerous...

...play [is] an instinct developed by natural selection ... and ... on a level with the other instincts which are developed for their utility. It is very near, in its origin and function, to the instinct of imitation, but yet they are distinct .... Its utility is, in the main, twofold: First, it enables the young animal to exercise himself beforehand in the strenuous and necessary functions of its life and so to be ready for their onset; and, second, it enables the animal by a general instinct to do many things in a playful way, and so to learn for itself much that would otherwise have to be inherited in the form of special instincts; this puts a premium on intelligence, which thus comes to replace instinct....

Reading books will get you to the door, reading people will get you inside the room.

Regular people have such a hard time listening to the low hum of instinct.

Seek spirituality of thy soul.

Seek to hear thy inner voice.

She is still forming her conclusions but, above all, is convinced that their actions are borne of instinct: fixed patterns that take them to their source of food, to their safe havens, to their mates, and, ultimately, to their death, since their predators learn these patterns as surely as if they, too, had read Maud’s book.

Some instincts are best left uncivilized

Sometimes you just have to trust your instincts; it may be all you have to trust.

Sometimes gut instinct is what determines the direction we should take.

Some people you don't give up on. Not because you can tell what they'll be or what will happen. Not because of that. It's because something inside you insists that you shouldn't---something knows more or knows better, stubbornly holds its ground, even while the the rest of the world and a million statistics and your own rational brain buzzes around you, chanting that you're a fool. And maybe they're right. Maybe you ARE a fool. But what if you're not? Can you give up without knowing if that voice was right all along? Where's the peace in that?

So stretch! Reach for it. Like falling down stairs, where your inner-genius takes over and saves you — your instincts are ready to serve you.

Tại sao chúng ta cứ hướng về quá khứ? Có lần Karin đã bảo tôi rằng, đó là bản năng của con người. Con người là sinh vật không thể không ngoái lại phía sau. Cảm xúc "nhớ nhung" cũng đồng nghĩa với việc kiếm tìm "thời gian" xưa cũ. Yêu mọi khoảnh khắc, quý trọng cuộc đời, những ý nghĩ đó tạo nên "giấc mơ", và giấc mơ ấy là thế giới mà những người ta yêu đang sống.

Survival requires guts and instinct.

The conscience is a right mix of instinct, reason and culture. The conscience itself is not a truth but it has an ability to access the truth. But the very conscience is assembled only by the reason.

... that form of the instinct of self-preservation with which we guard everything that is best in ourselves...

That lack of value sense would deprive a person from a protective instinct.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everyhing else we ove--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

The Church being what she is cannot have the instincts of a gentleman.

The continuation of man’s life is more attributable to his fear of death than it is to his desire to live. As a matter of fact, in countless cases, it is attributable to only the former.

The difficult thing is not to pick up the information but to recognise it - to accept it into our consciousness. Most of us find it difficult to know what we are feeling about anything. In any situation it is almost impossible to know what is really happening to us. This is one of the penalties of being human and having a brain so swarming with interesting suggestions and ideas and self-distrust.

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.

The first reaction is surely the most natural one, but not always the most correct one; thereupon, the invention of apologies.

The heart is seldom wiser than the mind, but when it is, listen to it.

[T]he institution that human cultures build up upon the hints presented by the environment or by man's physical necessities do not keep as close to the original impulse as we easily imagine. These hints are, in reality, mere rough sketches, a list of bare facts. [...] Warfare is not the expression of the instinct of pugnacity. Man's pugnacity is so small a hint in the human equipment that it may not be given any expression in inter-tribal relation. [...] Pugnacity is no more than the touch to the ball of custom, a touch also that may be withheld.

The feeling of loathing had as yet no permanence or strength in the dog’s soul. The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety. Nimrod kept on barking, but the tone of it had changed imperceptibly, had become a parody of what it had been - an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.

The heart is the only sacred home.

The inner voice is divine voice of God.

The instinct, quiet inner voice is the voice of the Holy Spirit.

The instinct that drives compulsion is universal. It is an attempt to solve the problem of disconnection, alienation, tepid despair... the problem is ultimately 'being human' in an environment that is curiously ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that entails.

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.

The opinion of each person matters. All opinions are subjective. We should stop relying on others' views and start believing in our own instinct whatever position in the society we have. All are equal.

The mind is weak, and it must be mastered, controlled. The body, it knows no master save for instinct and, unfortunately, it is built for terminal suffering.

They only seemed to respond to one instinct. Hunger.

There is a part of us that knows the timing of any relationship. It knows things that we cannot work out. It knows when to say yes. It knows when to say no. It knows when to wait. It knows when something has finished. It knows when something has started. It knows when we have a responsibility to another person. It knows when the ties are untied. It will not betray us or another.

There seemed no answer. He wasn't resigned to anything, he hadn't accepted or adjusted to the life he'd been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague's last victim, nine since he's spoken to another human being, ten since Virginia had died. Here he was with no future and a virtually hopeless present. Still plodding on. Instinct? Or was he just stupid? Too unimaginative to destroy himself? Why hadn't he done it in the beginning when he was in the very depths? What had impelled him to enclose the house, install a freezer, a generator, an electric stove, a water tank, build a hothouse, a workbench, burn down the houses on each side of his, collect records and books and mountains of canned supplies, even - it was fantastic when you thought about it - even put a fancy mural on the wall? Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments? He closed his eyes. Why think, why reason? There was no answer. His continuance was an accident and an attendant bovinity. He was just too dumb to end it all, and that was about the size of it.

The spirit finds a way to be born. Instinct seeks for ways to survive.

the subject of free will another debated topic do we or don't we have the ability to pick? greatly controlled by mind at lower levels of consciousness almost non-existent, one's free will is notably less at this level one’s actions are purely reactionary lacking self-awareness, animal instincts are primary not going along with the mind, free will increases then higher up, it's surrendered until it ceases thus, there both is and is not the capacity to choose even when we do it's limited by one's views choosing alternatively, with a mind conditioned and bound free will, then, is at best constrained and drowned

The truly rational thing is not to reason, but to follow one's instincts.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct, Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

This boy - his name was Eric - said he thought it disgusting the way all the girls at my college stood around on the porches under the porch lights and in the bushes in plain view, necking madly before the one o'clock curfew, so everybody passing by could see them. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are we? Animals.