Best 601 quotes in «instinct quotes» category

Now that this destiny was about to happen, every instinct within him fought against it, realizing he had been fetishizing suicide.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

Of course there are mothers, squeezing their breasts dry, pawning their bodies, shedding teeth for their children, or that’s our fond belief. But remember - Hansel and Gretel were dumped in the forest because their parents were starving.

O Lord point the right path for me to walk on it.

Once we’ve had time for reflection, instinct leads to insight. Insight tells us more than that which is visible on the surface. It is complex.

One is better off following one's whims, one's natural bent, than trying to reason things out.

One's instinct is at first to try and get rid of a discrepancy, but I believe that experience shows such an endeavour to be a mistake. What one ought to do is to magnify a small discrepancy with a view to finding out the explanation.

One thus gets an impression that civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means to power and coercion. It is, of course, natural to assume that these difficulties are not inherent in the nature or civilization itself but are determined by the imperfections of the cultural forms which have so far been developed. And in fact it is not difficult to indicate those defects. While mankind has made continual advances in its control over nature and may expect to make still greater ones, it is not possible to establish with certainty that a similar advance has been made in the management of human affairs; and probably at all periods, just as now once again, many people have asked themselves whether what little civilization has thus acquired is indeed worth defending at all. One would think that a re-ordering of human relations should be possible, which would remove the sources of dissatisfaction with civilization by renouncing coercion and the suppression of the instincts, so that, undisturbed by internal discord, men might devote themselves to the acquisition of wealth and its enjoyment. That would be a golden age, but it is questionable if such a state of affairs can be realized. It seems rather that every civilization must be built upon coercion and renunciation of instinct; it does not even seem certain that if coercion were to cease the majority of human beings would be prepared to undertake to perform the work necessary for acquiring new wealth. One has, I think, to reckon with the fact that there are present in all men destructive, and therefore anti-social and anti-cultural, trends and that in a great number of people these are strong enough to determine their behavior in human society.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

...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....

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

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...

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

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

Seek to hear thy inner voice.

Seek spirituality of thy soul.

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

The heart is the only sacred home.

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

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.

Survival requires guts and instinct.

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 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.

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

The inner voice is divine voice of God.

[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 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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

There are no laws set in stones, follow your basic instincts, they contain the laws that guide you existence.