Instinct Quotes

Listen to your instincts, you will make the best-choices.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

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.

~ Nikola Tesla

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

~ Jean-Henri Fabre

Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?

~ Gaston Bachelard

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.

~ Richard Matheson

You know you love something if you're willing to die for it, and you know it means nothing if you walk away from that which is dying.

~ Anthony Liccione

There was something about the story she told us...that didn't seem right to him. He didn't buy the idea they'd been lovers. He reckoned it was something else. It's the sort of thing he used to pick up on, when I worked with him. You know as well as I do, sir, in a case like this you collect all sorts of facts, but only a few really matter, and Mr Madden had a gift for spotting them. Not that he always knew why: often it was just something he felt - a sort of instinct, I suppose - though he would have said it was simply a matter of paying attention. That's what he used to tell me.

~ Rennie Airth

Be careful who's advice you heed to! It is better to listen to your heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

None of my mental activities for the past twenty-four hours might be called thinking. I had allowed my body to take charge. It knew far more about escaping and healing than I did.

~ Geoffrey Household

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

~ Frank Herbert

The creative process is a cocktail of instinct, skill, culture and a highly creative feverishness. It is not like a drug; it is a particular state when everything happens very quickly, a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, of fear and pleasure, it's a little like making love, the physical act of love.

~ Francis Bacon

Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

~ Manel Loureiro

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

~ Don Marquis

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

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

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.

~ Thiruman Archunan

Some people look for the obvious and make decisions based on that. However, sensitive people look for the subtle things in life. They observe what is missed, overlooked and rarely observed by others. They dwell at a deeper level of perception that clings to signs, body language and what is left unspoken. They are observers that will trust their instinct first over any fact or well delivered speech.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Tabini was at least canny enough in the differences between atevi and human to know that, gut level, he might think he understood - but chances were very good that he wouldn't, couldn't, and never would, unaided by the paidhi, come up with the right forecast of human behavior because he didn't come with the right hardwiring. Average people didn't analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.

~ C.j. Cherryh

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own case and deciding in its own favour would be rather simple minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged: or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

~ C.s. Lewis

Everyone judges constantly: positively judging one person is the same as negatively judging everyone else, it is to say that that person is superior in some sense.

~ Criss Jami

Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Think of instinct as an unscientific, unquantifiable tool that can be used along with more concrete evaluations to make a well-rounded decision.

~ Charisse Montgomery

Your instinct is your divine being.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Choices, Choices, Choices!Listen to your instincts; you will make the best-choices.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

He tried to decide if he was really ashamed of being afraid, and decided that he was not. Fear was there for a purpose. It was wired into any creature that had not completely turned its back on its evolutionary inheritance and so remade itself in whatever image it coveted. The more sophisticated you became, the less you relied on fear and pain to keep you alive; you could afford to ignore them because you had other means of coping with the consequences if things went badly.

~ Iain M. Banks

Exactly what the powers of hell feed on: the best instincts in man.

~ Philip K. Dick

All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

~ George Everett Macdonald

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

~ Sunday Adelaja

Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right.

~ Mario Cuomo

My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible - actually a profound position. Perspective, the line of vision, the frame of vision - these set a distance.

~ Eudora Welty

Instinct's aware of reflex when mind ain't yet.

~ Toba Beta

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

What saves us from succumbing to utter meaninglessness is not reason but instinct.

~ Marty Rubin

Art works to satisfy the instinct and the science works to satisfy the reason.

~ Thiruman Archunan

In solitude, you listen to the sacred voice.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I don't think there are any true heroes. Just people who ignore their survival instincts long enough to do something incredibly foolhardy.

~ Lauren James

I don't know if cats understand what their owners say, but they do have a strong survival instinct.

~ Manel Loureiro

You cannot sensibly expect a starving 'God-fearing' man to honor the 8th commandment.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana