Quotes About Instinct

If your cave-dwelling ancestors were enamored with the beauty of the scenery instead of, let's say, the herd of carnivorous dinosaurs stampeding their way, they would not have survived to create the miracle that is you.

The steering wheel and the engine are of equal importance. It is a human impulse—composed of equal parts arrogance and instinct—to believe we can rank everything in our environment. Importance is not an intrinsic quality of the universe. It exists only in our delusion-filled minds. I can assure you that humans are not in any form or fashion more important than rocks or steering wheels or engines.

question on cross-examination to which they don't know the answer, but Stern's instinct is that there is an opportunity for the defense

I go where the lizards tell me.

Maybe human beings are programmed...to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad...

ONE HUNDRED TIMES have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see?

Si je voyais du sang, je serais plus tranquille. Ah! J'ai déjà cent fois saisi un couteau pour faire cesser l'oppression de mon cœur. L'on parle d'une noble race de chevaux qui, quand ils sont échauffés et surmenés, s'ouvrent eux-mêmes, par instinct, une vaine avec les dents pour se faciliter la respiration. Je me trouve souvent dans le même cas : je voudrais m'ouvrir une veine qui me procurât la liberté éternelle.

Naturalists tell of a noble race of horses that instinctively open a vein with their teeth, when heated and exhausted by a long course, in order to breathe more freely. I am often tempted to open a vein, to procure for myself everlasting liberty.

Non si accorge che il cuore le batte, che le vacillano i piedi, che i sensi minacciano di lasciarla.

The unconscious evaluation of everything does appear to be a very old and primitive effect that existed long before we developed conscious and deliberate modes of thought.

We have this bias toward attractiveness because of out selfish-gene history: the unconscious mandate to reproduce, reproduce, reproduce, so that we as species don't go extinct. This deep-seated urge is so strong that studies have shown that men's mating motives are triggered by the mere presence of attractive women, even when they are trying to focus on something else.

Never make a calculation until you know the answer. Make an estimate before every calculation, try a simple physical argument (symmetry! invariance! conservation!) before every derivation, guess the answer to every paradox and puzzle. Courage: No one else needs to know what the guess is. Therefore make it quickly, by instinct. A right guess reinforces this instinct. A wrong guess brings the refreshment of surprise. In either case life as a spacetime expert, however long, is more fun!

I don't know, Doctor. But I'd suggest you arm yourself and kill anyone who looks to be in need of it.

When our instinctual life is shamed, the natural core of our life is bound up. It's like an acorn going through excruciating agony for becoming an oak, or a flower feeling ashamed for blossoming.

I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

All this was very loose guessing, and I don't pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn't any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don't know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.

No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible.

For if by natural instinct or wisdom we could bring ourselves back to the road and escape from error, we would have no need for Christ. But

Section 1. The knowledge of God being manifested to all makes the reprobate without excuse. Universal belief and acknowledgement of the existence of God. That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to

That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity [sensus divinitatis], we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead…. …this is not a doctrine which is first learned at school, but one as to which every man is, from the womb, his own master; one which nature herself allows no individual to forget.

That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.

simply do whatever comes naturally.

But there were some who went with her willingly, for there are other women who dream of lying with wolves.

Slow animals always become prey in the end.