Quotes About Instinct

T]he constitution of man's nature is of itself subject to desire novelty.

E]very man . . . shuns what is evil, but chiefly the chiefest of natural evils, which is death; and this he doth, by a certain impulsion of nature, no less than that whereby a stone moves downward.

Literature is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

He always knows instantly whether I have chosen the wild or the world, directly I get outside the door.

i poj?? z przera?eniem, ?e u kresu wszechrzeczy jest jedynie cia?o, k?y i pazury.

Y quiso el destino que en ese preciso instante entrara Tadzio por la puerta de cristales.

Poetry is not communication with angels or with the subconscious. It is communication with the guts, genitals, and five portals of sense. Nothing more.

Poetry has to be as hasty and rough as eating, sleep or sex.

brain has but one primary mission: to keep us safe and ensure our survival.

Maybe there's something instinctive in us, that we're drawn to human habitation and can't resist a ruin, the way newborn babies respond to a crude drawing of a face. These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we've retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come.

A newborn is murderous/but can't do anything about it.

She thought it was probably a good idea to like being looked at if you were a girl—it was probably key to survival. If you were a gorilla it was the other way around. Somewhere the girl had read that if you looked a gorilla in the eye it would strangle you.

Apes or human – we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana.

It's not a calculation. It's a smart woman's instinct for self defense.

When a mosquito sees a light in the darkness, it is drawn to it by an urge too powerful to resist. Even if the light is a bug zapper, caked with the carcasses of all the mosquito's electrocuted relatives, the poor insect will still use the last flap of its wings to fly to its death. It simply can't help it.

Great songs write themselves. You're just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much. Ignore intelligence, ignore everything; just follow it where it takes you.

I wish I could control myself! When I get in a tight place, it seems all I can think of is cutting their heads off!

But we didn't know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we'd grown up with.

Guys are like dogs: they never notice if you've changed your hair, but they can sense when there's another guy sniffing around their territory.

I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse -- borne away with every breath!

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Suppose you have shown a lot of mercy to someone. But they haven't ever thanked you or acknowledged what you have done. When that happens to me, my instinct is to want to choke that person. But when you know God's mercy to you in Christ, when you know the forgiveness of sins, your hands are so full of God's good gifts of mercy and grace that you don't have a hand free to choke anyone.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....

Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious