Quotes About Instinct

She wouldn't dispute that there was such a thing as sheer, instinctive physical attraction, but sexual attraction was a more intricate process, and the greater part of it happened in the head. Good sex needed commitment, and by that she didn't mean honourable intentions or proven longevity. Commitment was about how much you were prepared to let go. If you were with someone long enough, that came through trust. Otherwise, it had to come through abandon.

Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.

People do not calculate. As masses, they cannot calculate. They feel only, and are therefore not led by interests nor state — or public Law, principles or deductions, but only by feeling. If you prefer the word, by instincts.

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

In the midst of such uncertainty, I cling not to what I know, but what I feel.

A goose instinctively heads south in a V-formation in a V formed of other geese instinctively heading south. It doesn't check out the beach and experiment with a sandpiper lifestyle. It does what it's designed to do.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

The period before something learns to be afraid is the most dangerous of all, because it is then the creatures are the most vulnerable.

If there's no apparent reason for something to change, then why does it change? Is it a dog's nature to vary behaviour when life becomes too comfortable? Is it ours?

I stalked around the edge of the wood, crouching low, holding my breath. My attention was microscopically fierce. I'd become a thing of eyes and will alone. Mabel held her wings out from her sides, her head snaking, reptilian, eyes glowing. It felt like I was holding the bastard offspring of a flaming torch and an assault rifle.

And when I look again she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by a million years of evolution for a life she's not yet lived.

You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning.

One is never sure, watching two cats washing each other, whether it's affection, the taste, or a trial run for the jugular.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.

Base yourself on what you feel, even when you alone feel it.

La fièvre fit plus d'animaux que les ovaires n'en firent jamais.

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books.

Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.

As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist 'does not renounce the use of his intelligence' – which is, after all, the source of 'lessons, methods, and knowledge'. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations 'a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration', which alone can provide the 'direct contact with nature from which the vital spark must leap'.

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosiac, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.