Quotes About Instinct

Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.

I just use intuition - would I wear that? Would it feel okay? It's pretty simple, nothing too complicated.

Sharks - I'm sure they're going to get me one day.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

'The Newton Boys' was the one time I've made a film with really active characters who weren't at all self-reflexive and just plowed through their lives. There's a part of everyone that's like that. We have a biological imperative to keep living, keep moving forward... We have no choice.

I choose totally by instinct. And the only time I've ever gone against my instincts, I've regretted it.

Only time will tell in what ways Freud was prescient and in what ways he failed to understand how the mind functions. For example, no scientist and very few psychoanalysts still embrace Freud's death instinct.

'Saturday Night Live' is a very particular beast. What it celebrates are individuals who can stand out. I did good work there, but going onstage and saying, 'Hey! Hey! Look at me! Aren't I funny?' - that just wasn't my instinct.

I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.

Part of the reason why I love to operate is because I find that so much of what we do is instinctual. It's dancing with the actors and responding to their body language, and you feel what the right place for the camera is at any given moment.

I form opinions quickly.

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.

But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to stave them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough – more than enough, I should imagine.

My first impressions of people are invariably right.

Then I must learn how to be happy.  Once I knew it, or thought I knew it, by instinct.  It was always springtime once in my heart.  My temperament was akin to joy.  I filled my life to the very brim with pleasure, as one might fill a cup to the very brim with wine.  Now I am approaching life from a completely new standpoint, and even to conceive happiness is often extremely difficult for me.

have a wonderful instinct about things.  They can discover everything except the obvious.

ingenium mala saepe movent

Ask the first lion cub you meet, and it will tell you that, once you've tasted blood, there is no pulling up, and it's the same with opening telegrams.

You might just as well argue with a wolf on the trail of a fat Russian peasant.

You know, you smoke too much, Pat, said his wife, seizing the opening with the instinct which makes an Irishman at a fair hit every head he sees.

My hand tells me what I'm thinking.

Bit it was her scent that just about killed him. Clean skin. Woman. And something more—something that made him feel like dispensing with five thousand years of civilization, dragging her off to a cave somewhere, and filling her with babies.