Quotes About Instinct

Real fear is like intense pain. It's there to warn you something's truly wrong.

Hell, we were the ones who were attacked. She was in heat. Some women get drunk or high and all they want to do is fuck.

writers instinctively tried to generate plots from events around them as a means of survival, the way a pigeon is always searching for food, pecking at everything in sight. A spy lacked the imagination or the drive for that kind of free-association creativity.

Duncan looked at Eve. "I think I'm going to like him." "You're a dog," Eve said. "You love anyone who gives you food." "Woof, woof," Duncan said, then swiveled to face his desk and get to work.

Cruelty is not taught. It is as certain as a compass point. One can be instructed in the specifics of cruelty, like one can be taught to use a spoon, a knife, a fork, but even without these skills a man will still eat. The need is with us.

A wild animal, when cornered, may suddenly and desperately defend itself. This is why I try not to spend any more time outdoors than is absolutely necessary.

As far as I could tell, people didn't do things because they were good or evil. They did things because they could not think of what else to do

Sex is like crime. Only one per cent motivation and ninety-nine per cent opportunity.

Like all women she was tyrannized by her biology.

We find we have little to guide us in our search and must put trust in the only power we have, that natural instinct that propels us toward creation, choice, liberation and change. We must yield to the challenge of becoming fully human and trust in our human processes in the hope that they will lead us there. Out challenge then is clear, to make as much of the illusion as possible a reality. After all, our reality is not more than what was once our illusion.

We find we have little to guide us in our search and must put trust in the only power we have, that natural instinct that propels us toward creation, choice, liberation and change. We must yield to the challenge of becoming fully human and trust in our human processes in the hope that they will lead us there. Our challenge then is clear, to make as much of the illusion as possible a reality. After all, our reality is no more than what was once our illusion.

Instinct is a makeshift, an admission of helplessness before the problem of reality.

Driver had the keys bunched in his hand, one braced and protruding between second and third fingers. Stepping directly forward, he punched his fist at alpha dog's windpipe, feeling the key tear through layers of flesh, looking down as he lay gasping for air.

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

The average sendentary man of our time who is at all suggestible must emerge from this chapter believing that his chances of surviving a combination of instinct, complexes, reflexes, glands, sex, and present-day traffic conditions are about equal to those of a one-legged man trying to get out of a labyrinth.

For example, automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes. But people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles. Why? Because in our EEA spiders and snakes were a serious threat to our survival and reproduction, whereas automobiles did not exist. Thus, it was possible—not to mention advantageous for our survival and reproduction—for us to evolve an innate aversion to spiders and snakes, but not to automobiles.

You might not know when it's wrong, but you sure know when it's right.

Worst of all, she realized, Zohrane was without fear, and fear is the braking system of intelligence.

But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.

If I am a wild Beast I cannot help it. It is not my own fault.

It's—I'm sorry, Eliza—it's the way you make a fool of yourself now. He says that you have crumbled. Nobody now would dream you had been to a university. Your prudence did not develop. Say what you like about equality of mind, prudence is usually a male attribute, especially in the Civil Service where of course there are still very few women, as we know. Making judgments is a female failing, justified by the dangerous word 'instinct.

Some people say... that violence and war are inevitable. I say rubbish: Our brains are fully capable of controlling instinctive behavior. We're not very good at it though, are we?

Sometimes I [longed to be a chimp]... I just wanted to know... what it felt like in the evening to be making a nest and what it felt like to be a female when a big male comes thundering in.

Actually, it's a survival trait," she finally concluded. "That's what it is. It is a human survival trait and without it we perish.