Quotes About Instinct

He didn't believe there was a Heaven or Hell, and to him, the concept of sin was an abstraction founded in cultural mythology. It wasn't science, therefore it wasn't real. He knew though, that suicide was universally considered a sin, a grievous sin, and for some reason-perhaps a subconscious instinct of self-preservation, which was actually a biological, not a spiritual activity, he wondered... What if I'm wrong? What if I kill myself and I go to Hell?

while the modern, human animal is capable of deep thought and, like its mammalian forebears, can nurture and play, it also is capable of behaving in an absolutely "reptilian" manner.

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

When a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.

But of a sudden his head went up; his stiff-poised brush broke into swift wagging; his lips curled down. He had recognized that his prospective foe was not of his own sex. (And nowhere, except among humans, does a full-grown male ill-treat or even defend himself against the female of his species.)

For this is the considerate way of dogs; and of cats as well. When dire sickness smites them, they do not hang about, craving sympathy and calling for endless attention. All they want is to get out of the way,—well out of the way, into the woods and swamps and mountains; where they may wrestle with their life-or-death problem in their own primitive manner; and where, if need be, they may die alone and peacefully, without troubling anyone else.

There are two things—and perhaps only two things—of which the best type of thoroughbred collie is abjectly afraid and from which he will run for his life. One is a mad dog. The other is a poisonous snake.

But a collie is like no other dog. Back in his brain ever lurks the queerly wise instinct, though never incurable savagery, of the olden wolves he sprang from.

At sound and scent of the approaching huddle of sheep, Treve leaped to his feet; queer ancestral instincts tugging at the back of his alert young brain. In all his eight months of life he had never seen nor smelt a sheep. But his Scottish ancestors, for a hundred generations, had earned their right to live by tending such creatures as these which came trooping past the shack. Something far stronger than himself urged the put to action.

I do not pretend to say whether or not dogs have a language of their own. Personally, I think they have, and a very comprehensive one, too. But I cannot prove it. No dog student, however, will deny that two dogs communicate their wishes to each other in some way by (or during) the swift contact of noses.

Las guerras ocurren por culpa del deseo. Porque no nos separamos del animal, porque no lo mantenemos a raya, porque dejamos que nos ocupe todo el cuerpo y que nos vuelva animales...

Fra le mille maniere di fare un'azione, scegliamo sempre istintivamente la peggiore.

A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.

His people had known innumerable catastrophes, and an age-old instinct made him give himself over to true time, the time that cannot be measured, where twenty years pass like an hour and a second can last a thousand years.

Right now, it didn't look good, the life. What doesn't kill you makes you horny.

Era, dico, una cosa singolare a vedere alcune di quelle capre, ritte e quiete sopra questo o quel bambino, dargli la poppa; e qualche altra accorrere a un vagito, come con senso materno, e fermarsi presso il piccolo allievo, e procuprar d'accomodarcisi sopra, e belare, e dimenarsi, quasi chiamando chi venisse in aiuto a tutt'e due.

The thing every good leader should have is an instinct.

The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either. It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind.

Love is never governed by Reason.

Man is an animal which, alone among the animals, refuses to be satisfied by the fulfilment of animal desires.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

Crying is the most primitive mechanism the body has to relieve tension and pain.