Quotes About Instinct

No matter how dark, the hand always knows the way to the mouth.

The heart doesn't know it's expanding with compassion anymore than a hawk spreading its swings knows it's being a hawk. Nor does someone acting out of love often realize they are being kind.

The Art of Facing Things What people have forgotten is what every salmon knows. —ROBERT CLARK

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

Fish gotta swim and bird gotta sly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.

All right then. Pull yourself together. Is there where I'm spending my life, in the reptile brain, this lamp at the top of the spine like a lighthouse flipping mad beams indiscriminately into the darkness, into the furred thoraxes of moths, onto the backs of leaping fishes and the wrecks of schooners? Come up a level; surface.

Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.

The trouble is, the human brain isn't designed to make us happy and fulfilled. It's designed to make us survive. This two-million-year-old organ is always looking for what's wrong, for whatever can hurt us, so that we can either fight it or take flight from it. If you and I leave this ancient survival software to run the show, what chance do we have of enjoying life?

Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

Love is involuntary. It does not often run in a yoke with prudence.

Of course, sir; when a man's stomach rises above his intelligence, he'll have to argue accordingly,' said the Senator.

Common sense] is a spontaneous set of beliefs which together express a conception of the world which takes the social order as 'the way things are.' It is apparently the 'spontaneous feelings' that people have, the traditional popular conception of the world – what is unimaginatively called "instinct" although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition.

Self-preservation is the first and strongest law of nature

You cannot help it, chérie." Mirabelle's small greenish eyes fixed themselves kindly on Elizabeth. She nodded and shrugged. "You cannot help acting from what you were taught in childhood, even though you don't want to. Above all this is true for a woman.

Man is his desire.

since to avoid the painful and aim at the pleasurable is one of the most obvious tendencies of human nature.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes; chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

There is only one driving force: The desire.

95% of everything you do is the result of habit.

the Chief Good we feel instinctively must be something which is our own, and not easily to be taken from us.

I guess I'll just … play it by ear." She could have bitten her tongue off.

any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic.

Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

Nicole's intuition told her not to follow the fireflies, but she said nothing.