Quotes About Instinct

In response to the question, 'How do you know when you're finished?' Pollock replied, 'How do you know when you're finished making love?

I don't believe in hunches. Hunches are for dogs making love.

Never ask a hungry cat whether he loves you for yourself alone.

My knives are like a tongue - I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don't love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife.

It's a real primal thing, watching someone get hurt. It's funny and accessible.

They were like animals, men. They found too much eye contact threatening.

It inspires a bit of awe to see working dogs really do their jobs, to see thousands of years of history, instinct, and breeding well up and become manifest in a sunny pasture. It transforms the way an owner sees a dog, and the way the dog sees himself. This, perhaps, is the bond people talk about between working dogs and their masters. Working

The relationship between a dog and a human is always complicated. The two know each other in a way nobody else quite understands, a connection shrouded in personal history, temperament, experience, instinct, and love.

Dogs are born knowing exactly what they want to do: eat, scratch, roll in disgusting stuff, sniff and squabble with other dogs, roam, sleep, have sex. Little of this is what we want them to do, of course. We ask them to sit, stay, smell peasant, practice abstinence, and be accommodating.

It was something, he was sure, he would be capable of tearing flesh from bone to defend.

That internal beast is human nature. It cannot be killed; it can only be tamed. And even then, constant vigilance is required.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.

The bottom line is that human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions. Within the first second of seeing, hearing, or meeting another person, the elephant has already begun to lean toward or away, and that lean influences what you think and do next. Intuitions come first.

It's a great example of how "innate" refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it's a mistake to look at today's hunter-gatherers and say, "See, that's what human nature really looks like!

the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously.

human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary

The first principle of moral psychology is Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

first principle of moral psychology: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.

human nature is 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.

Yu come face to face with love, and before the sun sets you've become someone you didn't used to be... It's the reason a wolf would chase a crow, even knowing he can't fly and she don't ever need to touch the ground.

There was no satisfying explanation for why Andrew [Haswell Green] and Samuel [Tilden] found themselves falling into a friendship. It was simply a matter of attraction, and instinct, and need, as it always is. Those factors and a hundred tiny, meaningless conversations that gradually accumulated into layers of familiarity.