Quotes About Instinct

Trying to keep a public men's room clean? Sure, go ahead and put up signs urging people to pee neatly—or, better, paint a housefly on the urinal and watch the male instinct for target practice take over.

especialmente por parte de los moralistas altruistas que se han convencido de que su sensibilidad estética y la repugnancia instintiva deberían acabar con cualquier esfuerzo humano por salvar vidas.»

Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.

As William James pointed out, humans are habit machines.

He's a carnivore, thinks Lion, always remember he's a carnivore.

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.

As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two.

In Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.

The likelihood that, in attacking a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out.

Children acquire spoken language instinctively but written language only by the sweat of their brow, because spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or hundreds of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention.

If a gene could build a brain that could tell when copies of itself were sitting in another animal's gonads, it would make the brain enjoy the other animal's well-being, and make it act in ways that increased that other animal's well-being.

Nature is a hanging judge

There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn't-eat.

The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

I don't know, I just got a feeling about her. You know when a song comes on and you just gotta dance?

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment.

intelligence is intuitive you needn't learn to love unless you've been taught to fear and hate

People on the edge of love go with their heart and not their head.

Fear is stronger than love