Quotes About Instinct

Era obvio que la empatía sólo se encontraba en la comunidad humana, en tanto que se podía hallar cierto grado de inteligencia en todas las especies, hasta en los arácnidos. Probablmente la facultad empática exigía un instinto de grupo sin cortapisas. A un organismo solitario, como una araña, de nada podía servirle.

The drive of unliving things is stronger than the drive of living things.

Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.

I bet you could catch bullets," she said, and threw the stick away. "How do you do that?" "By not being human," he said. "That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.

How do you do that? By not being human, he said. That's why you could never trick a bear. We see tricks and deceit as plain as arms and legs. We can see in a way humans have forgotten. But you know about this; you can understand the symbol reader.

He couldn't possibly have said why. He knew it at once, as strongly as he knew that fire burned and kindness was good.

we are what we are my boy and wolves is what we are

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society: or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast.

Psychologist and marketing guru Ernest Dichter, known as the "father of motivational research," explains that when human beings become fearful, most will regress to soothing, even infantile, behaviors and animalistic drives to distract themselves from, and channel, their anxiety.

There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.

There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.

The heart knows nothing except its own mind.

Feelings don't follow rules. Guilt does. Fear does. But attraction? No way.

Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a compound of pleasure and aversion. Both are deeply rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated.

In brief encounters, it seems, women demand sexy partners who are highly desirable to other women, perhaps because their sons stand a greater chance of being sexy themselves. Women, of course, do not think these thoughts; there is no conscious calculus of genetic effects. They just find some men sexy and that's all they need to produce sons who will be sexually successful.

Nothing feels better than being singled out by something that at best should fear you and at worst would like to eat you.

I read yesterday that when starved for food, the humpback cricket will chew off its own legs. If they regenerated this might be a half-decent idea, but they don't. So it eats its legs, and, unable to escape danger, it promptly gets eaten itself. That so seems like something I would do.

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it.

But then she looked into the single brown eye of the gaunt, half-naked woman facing her, and a wolf looked back at her—a wounded pack leader, starved and weakened, who had been goaded and harried by the hounds on its back trail but would be harried no more. A wolf who would die where it stood rather than be driven further.

need for you to infect him, since he already had a good sense

Empathy Is An Endangered Instinct

Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.

In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar. Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It's a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can. ~Odd Thomas

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.