Quotes About Instinct

Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison's.

Richard's angry grey eyes … honest grey eyes … were looking at him. Sybilla was not watching. He supposed she knew that however near he might tread to the crevasse, he did not mean to fall in, and drag Richard with him. Instinct had been right, when last year he had fled such a confrontation. As no living soul could hurt him, Sybilla could.

You don't need an argument for buying butter. It's a natural, human instinct.

I have a peculiar instinct about pubs. I can find one blindfold in a pea-souper with both hands tied behind me.

I has such a sinking in my inside I has to get up and eat biscuits.

You mean,' went on Wimsey, 'that they think in clichés.' 'Eh?' 'Formulae. "There's nothing like a mother's instinct" "Dogs and children always know." "Kind hearts are more than coronets. "Suffering refines the character"—that sort of guff, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind. It was very clear and very distinct, and he had now come to recognize these thoughts for what they were. His instinct was to resist them.

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.

I have the instinctive reaction of a Western man when confronted with sublimely incomprehensible. I grab my camera and start to photograph it

una volta che sai cos'è la cosa che vuoi che sia vera, l'istinto è un mezzo molto utile per metterti nelle condizioni di sapere che è vera

once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

But he was exhausted, too, and not even feeling as if he were alive. Inside him, it felt as if something brilliant, some fire, had been sucked from his soul, and now he was just an animal living on instinct.

There is no shame in impulse.

Unhappy endings are just as important as happy endings. They're an efficient way of transmitting vital Darwinian information. Your brain needs them to make maps of the world, maps that let you know what sorts of people and situations to avoid.

Animal behaviorists have noted again and again that predatory species often kill when they have no desire to eat. They are killing because the instinct to kill is very strong.

Our capacity for violence is greater, but not necessarily our desire.

Our modes of speech are bred in the bone, madam. We cannot escape them any more than we can the colour of our eyes.

If the murder rate that Jane Goodall saw among the several dozen chimpanzees she studied in Gombe were extrapolated to New York City, for example, there would be over fifty thousand murders a year there. "Man is the only animal that kills for pleasure" you hear people say. What poppycock!

Try as one may, it is impossible to deny one's nature.

What's bred in the bone will stick to the flesh.

Once a wolf, always a wolf.

Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.

The point is that one's got an instinct to live. One does not live because one's reason assents to living. People who, as we say, 'would be better dead,' don't want to die! People who apparently have got everything to live for just let themselves fade out of life because they have not got the energy to fight.