Quotes About Instinct

I don't go out there looking, 'Hey, let me make this throw to show off my arm or anything like that.' But if it's there, I've got to take the chance.

Men are naturally barbarians, and that will remain forever. The passion, the love, and the lust is intensifying with time.

You can't second-guess baseball. You can't second-guess yourself.

It's like kill or be killed, that's my thing basically.

I never choose jobs because of what I think I should do. I want to feel something. And with 'Beast,' it was very much like that.

I dunno - there's always a beast that comes out whenever I want it to... I can control the beast and everything, but it comes out when I want to.

I never know when I am being funny, and the other way too. I don't think you can think about that. I don't think you can try to be funny. Some people are just funny.

I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.

Crusty old alpinists who've survived a lifetime of close scrapes like to counsel young protégés that staying alive hinges on listening carefully to one's "inner voice.

Joseph wasn't by nature reflective or deliberative. He conducted his life impulsively, acting according to instinct and emotion. The Lord, it seemed to him, must surely have intended man to know the love of more than one wife or He wouldn't have made the prospect so enticing.

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk.

When they sank their teeth into cows, goats, pigs, and sheep, wolves committed sins unimaginable to them.

When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in. Absent a higher alternative, human nature drives us to make sense of the world on its own instinctual terms: That's tribalism.

How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use.

My practical intelligence said no, but my heart said yes.

I'm a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore.

I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

A primordial instinct going back to humanity's tribal past makes us see difference as a threat. That instinct is massively dysfunctional in an age in which our several destinies are interlinked. Oddly enough, it is the market -- the least overtly spiritual of concepts -- that delivers a profoundly spiritual message: that it is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse. When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain.

When I learned about this, I was told that it was "instinct." ("Instinct" continues to be the explanation of choice whenever animal behavior implies too much intelligence.) Instinct, though, wouldn't go very far in explaining how pigeons use human transportation routes to navigate. Pigeons follow highways and take particular exits, likely following many of the same landmarks as the humans driving below.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

Instiinct' blijft ook daarna de gebruikelijke verklaring wanneer het gedrag van dieren te veel op intelligentie lijkt te wijzen.

Aesthetic sense is the twin of one's instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics.