Quotes About Instinct

Life is a predator: you have to eat it before it eats you.

There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life.

The masculine energy was about survival. The male was the hunter who risked his life and had to be in the fight-flight mode.

I have always felt the basis of everything in life is sexual, and I will maintain that to my dying day

In my life, I often make so-called major decisions by very quick, immediate responses.

I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.

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!

Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.

To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you.

When your life is being threatened there's an instinctive urge to fight. You fight for the time you have, for your relationships.

Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?

One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning." Memoir From Antproof Case

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.

Steve Jobs was Galileo in a past life. Discovery was instinctual for him.

I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.

The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.

Or is that the nature of lust? It's like an urge that disregards all the stuff that your brain knows you actually think. I wonder if guys feel like this all the time. Or maybe if everyone feels like this all the time - everyone besides me - and that's why people act like such half-wits.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel. Its instinct is to assume that nothing either for good or evil has happened, and to resist the invader. Once gripped, it feels acutely, and its sensations in love are particularly profound. Given time, it can know and impart ecstasy; given time, it can sink to the heart of Hell.

One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her - that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy

The Imp of the Perverse.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later.