Quotes About Instinct

tottered through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of breath. One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-jointed with famine.  Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might have gone with him and

But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge. And it knew that it was not good to walk abroad in such fearful cold.

Under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice [...] that would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature protested against doing and was afraid of doing.

Había que dominar o ser dominado; y la piedad era una señal de debilidad. En la vida primitiva no existía. Se confundía piedad con temor y ello acarreaba la muerte. Matar o morir, comer o ser comido: tal era la ley; y Buck obedecía a aquel mandato que surgía de las profundidades del tiempo.

I oto zew doszedÅ' Bucka, nieomylny, zdobyty, prawdziwy. SiadÅ' wiÄ™c równie? i równie? zawyÅ'.

a pride greater than any he had yet experienced. He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.

He had lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life.

Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They rolled over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his feet almost as though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down the shoulder and leaping clear. Twice his teeth clipped together, like the steel jaws of a trap, as he backed away for better footing, with lean and lifting lips that writhed and snarled.

In dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild.

we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move.

He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial lite. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of times he obeyed.

Instinct and law demanded of him obedience.  But growth demanded disobedience.

He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his first experience taught him an unforgetable lesson.

Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun.

To him it signified death. He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

Colmillo Blanco aprendió una cosa pronto: que el dios ladrón era generalmente cobarde y huía fácilmente de los ruido alarmantes.

But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to come when the she-wolf

Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid.  Yet fear was in him.  It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives.

He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death.

He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death.  To him it stood as the greatest of hurts.  It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

Then he would cast a glance of fear at the wolf-circle drawn expectantly about him, and like a blow the realisation would strike him that this wonderful body of his, this living flesh, was no more than so much meat, a quest of ravenous animals, to be torn and slashed by their hungry fangs, to be sustenance to them as the moose and the rabbit had often been sustenance to him

The will to live, was his thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer.

Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence of life—the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the sky like a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great gray goose across the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood.

El objeto, el fin de la vida, era la carne. La vida misma era carne. La vida vivía de la vida. Unos comían y otros eran comidos. La ley consistía, pues, en eso: come o sé comido.