Quotes About Instinct

It is not possible to know how to behave in threatening situations before you even end up in such a situation.

On 'There Will Be Blood,' I was cast at the last minute. I had 3 and a half to 4 days to get ready for the first day. I just went for it, threw myself in there and gave it everything I had. That was just guts and instinct, not a lot of preparation.

One thing I can't prove, but I firmly believe is that two men were put on this earth - one threw a punch and a third guy came over and watched. And that happened before anybody ever threw or kicked a ball.

It was somewhere in Ohio - Cedar Point or something like that - one of those thrill rides. A few cars up, someone's sunglasses had fallen off, and we were on one of those corkscrew parts, and I saw sunglasses and just instinctively grabbed them right out of the air. I was like, 'Oh, my reaction time is really good. This is going well.'

I grew up reading thrillers, science fiction, fantasy - you name it - and one day I asked myself if there was a reason why a fear of spiders was so common. Was there something buried deep in our evolutionary history that made being scared of spiders a survival instinct?

Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.

In every advanced mammalian species that survives and thrives, a common anthropological characteristic is the fierce behavior of the adult female of the species when she senses a threat to her cubs. The lioness, the tigress and the mama bear are all examples.

They look at me and I kind of back up in case they go for my throat.

Cinematography is so much about instinct and intuition - you want the same range of experience going into behind the camera as what you see in front of it. Your life experience will come through the lens.

It's not like I mean to throw no-look passes. I think it kind of happens out of instinct. As I do it, I'm like, 'Dang, I didn't even mean to do that.'

When I throw a dart, even when I'm looking I know if I've missed or hit as soon as I release the dart.

When I throw a softball, there's no time to think about the motion of my arm. I just look at the first baseman's glove and react.

If there was a fire at my house I would throw more things on it. The only thing I would take out? Myself!

Your natural instinct when people are throwing punches at you is to back up. That just makes it more dangerous for you. You'll get hurt that way. You've got to teach yourself to go forward, move your feet and move your head. I'm not going to lie, that was tough for me to learn.

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.

Playing shortstop is 75 to 80 percent anticipation, knowing the hitter and the pitch being thrown.

I have seen one shrike occupy himself for hours in sticking up on thorns, a number of small fishes that the fishermen had thrown on the shore. The fishes dried up and decayed.

How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.

I'm making throws where I don't have to second guess, putting the ball where it needs to be, and when I'm making each throw, there's no grabbing or pulling in there, and it feels comfortable and fluid.

Imagine, for example, birds. When they look out at the world, they have a sense that they are alive. If they are in pain, they can do something about it. If they have hunger or thirst, they can satisfy that. It's this basic feeling that there is life ticking away inside of you.

If you rile a tiger, he's going to show his claws.

My son smelled like a cinnamon bun, and that smell entered into my biological being, and it became an imperative that I keep him alive at all costs, so then there's this monster - this tiger or lion - that comes forward in you to protect them. And it doesn't stop. It doesn't matter if they become men or women.

Now I know why tigers eat their young.

Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice.