Quotes About Instinct

Human beings have an ability to simply recognize the right thing to do sometimes. Judgment, Klein points out, is rarely a calculated weighing of all options, which we are not good at anyway, but instead an unconscious form of pattern recognition.

And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person's most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don't know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate.

There are times in life when logic and reason and probability must be recognized, but then ignored.

Don't think. Believe. Trust your heart, not your brain. Don't think. Feel. Believe.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

E lei ora desidera. È uscito del letargo della sua rassegnata solitudine, ha scoperto la fame del suo cuore, sa che la mela è proibita, ma desidera. Non avrà più pace, né dieta. [...] Soffrirà, il suo cuore, lo stomaco e le viscere andranno in subbuglio, il suo istinto di Homo erectus potrà essere temprato, ma non vinto. La mela è caduta dall'albero del destino.

Crud. What was she supposed to do? Protect herself or the pretzels?

Places to which I am instinctively attracted are places where I imagine suffering to be absent. "There," I think, "if only I could get there, then I would suffer no more." The groundless ground of contingency, however, holds out no such hope. For this is the ground where you are born and die, get sick and grow old, are disappointed and frustrated. To

I figured that I should just do what I wanted to do. Not think about it. Not say it out loud.

Arby's: If I was about to be killed, I would eat it.

I think it. I say it. You hear it. Sometimes, I don't even think it, I just say it.

Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.

but his body persisted in rebellion and his senses nagged at him like pampered babies.

aggression with a deeply rooted instinct to charge

instinctively looked for guidance and inspiration. They were

I instinctively dislike ever to uphold the conservative as opposed to the bold

I believe that poetry is a primal impulse within us all.

rabbits have white tails in order that it be easy for us to shoot them.

There's no bitch on earth like a mother frightened for her kids.

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.

Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either.

Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.