Quotes About Instinct

Living defensively is the central theme of our age. How else can we live? Biologically we've instructed ourselves in the deepest way possible that living in a defensive manner is the only way we'll survive, both in theme and fact.

The golden age is early infancy. Soon after this the corruption of the erotic instinct takes place. In a very short time everything falls apart. The solidarity of opposites is completely shattered. Before you've learned to put two words together, you are mired in an existence full of essential dichotomies.

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

Fire," yells someone in a theater. Immediately everyone stampedes toward the exits. What do they do at the exit door? Push. If the door doesn't open, they push harder. But what if the door opens inward and must be pulled, not pushed? Highly anxious, highly focused people are very unlikely to think of pulling.

Science now knows that evolutionarily more advanced animals are more emotional than primitive ones, the human being the most emotional of all. Moreover, emotions play a critical role in daily lives, helping assess situations as good or bad, safe or dangerous.

The visceral level is fast: it makes rapid judgments of what is good or bad, safe or dangerous, and sends appropriate signals to the muscles (the motor system) and alerts the rest of the brain.

That experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make.

The Shark and the Flipper need to have the ability to recognize the signs, interpret them correctly, and then act without hesitation.

I ask and I ask and I ask, until I begin to get a gut feeling about something. And that's when I make a decision.

Lucy doesn't read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just is a dog.

among the million things the brain is good at, the overriding function of the brain is to help an individual survive and thrive.

CHOOSE A DESIRE RELEVANT TO THEIR SURVIVAL

Because our brains don't need to know how many chairs there are in the room to survive, but knowing where the exits are would be helpful in case there was a fire.

A hunch is a deduction your subconscious has made from evidence you don't yet know you have.

involuntarily

about the insurance and he felt his face grow red again. He'd reacted like a child with a new toy, running off at the first impulse, not pausing long enough to reflect or to check the information they did have available to them. He knew it was by now standard policy to suspect the spouse in any case of suspicious death, but he should have trusted his instinct about

We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.

To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal!

I knew it deeply and irrationally like knowledge in a dream.

Dogs live in the moment. They don't think. They don't dwell on the future. They exist to meet their base needs. Eating. Sleeping. Breeding. Surviving. No worries. No regrets. Minimize effort, maximize pleasure.

Holly hit her head against the shelving unit, and I grabbed her hair and helped her hit her head two more times. There was no tae kwon do name for that maneuver, but it felt great.

Among natural landscapes , however, we show the greatest preference for open spaces dotted with trees , with a little water nearby— picture the views from the high-rises that famously border Central Park in Manhattan; as the biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, "to see most clearly the manifestations of human instinct, it is useful to start with the rich.

Life is complicated, love isn't. If you need to think about it for one half second, you're not in love.

The inhibition of behavior provoked by cat odor is remarkably powerful and long-lasting. As summarized in Figure 1.1, following a single exposure to cat odor, animals continued to exhibit inhibition of play for up to five successive days. Our interpretation of this effect is that some unconditioned attribute of cat smell can innately arouse a fear system in the rat brain, and this emotional state becomes rapidly associated with the contextual cues of the chamber.