Quotes About Instinct

What you're calling evil, is part of human nature.

An emotional sort. As if there were any other kind of human. Show me an unemotional sort and I'll show you someone dangerous. How can emotion be avoided when life careens in its unexpected directions?

You learn about fight or flight, but no one ever mentions the third alliterative option - freeze.

Mankind is close to savagery and must live by rules. If not, we would sink into our own animal nature and perish.

our survival instinct, which influences the body and mind, is really just the unrealistic expectation that life is always pleasurable and never painful. Our bodies naturally crave pleasure, which we think equals happiness, safety, and survival. We hate pain, which we think equals unhappiness and death.

All these feelings are unnecessary suffering caused by an imbalance between our instinctual drive for happiness and our instinctual need for survival. It is also very important to remember that the end of suffering does not mean the end of pain or difficulties, just the end of creating unnecessary suffering in our lives.

There is something that the "Naturals" are doing that they don't know they are doing. And no matter how many times they tell you their so called "Secrets of Success", they can't tell you something they're not consciously aware of. It's like saying to a fish, "so tell me about water".

If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.

No other instinct can so satisfy without accomplishing its biological purpose, and no other instinct is so disconnected from its purpose.

Given that sexuality is an instinct, and instinct is traditionally defined as a hereditary behavior unique to a species, varying little from one member to the next, the variety of our sexual tastes is curious.

Sharks are more "natural" than life rafts-at least according to vulgar understanding-but, if forced to dive off a sinking ship and swim for my life, I'd rather meet a life raft than a shark! I daresay that radical environmentalists would share this view if the choice were actually forced upon them.2

But if the instinctual duality is Life and Death, our modification of Freud's ontology entails the hypothesis that Life and Death coexist in some undifferentiated unity at the animal level and that they could be reunified into some higher harmony in man

The death instinct is reconciled with the life instinct only in a life which is not repressed, which leaves no "unlived lines" in the human body, the death instinct then being affirmed in a body which is willing to die.

A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.

A good reliable set of bowels is worth more to a man than any quantity of brains." Henry Wheeler Shaw

Could a creature who had to look upon ordinary people literally as food and shelter ever understand how strongly those people valued life?

Gather information. Seek weakness. Watch, wait, and do what you have to to stay alive!

Human purpose isn't what you say it is or what I say it is. It's what your biology says it is--what your genes say it is.

Drowning people Sometimes die Fighting their rescuers. EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much? Is it not but an instinct derived from the days of slavery?

A menudo me pregunto por qué nos gustan unas personas y no otras. Y sobre este tema tengo mi propia teoría: existe una forma armónica e ideal a la que de manera instintiva tiende nuestro cuerpo. Escogemos en los otros aquellos rasgos que podrían cumplir con ese ideal. El objetivo de la evolución es meramente estético y nada tiene que ver con ninguna adaptación. A la evolución lo que le interesa es la belleza, alcanzar la máxima perfección de cada forma

Cat a pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs, and patronizes human beings.

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.