Quotes About Instinct

Love was a lizard brain instinct. A survival mechanism bred into the species that was totally separate from reason. Women were extremely vulnerable during pregnancy, and children were helpless for many years. If humans didn't have a mechanism for cementing a pair bond, nothing would remain but selfishness and promiscuity. Certain animal species were wired in the same way. How

The moral: the dimwitted and impulsive might not be able to hold a job or learn algebra, but they sure knew how to screw each other—and reproduce like crazy.

You're wired by evolution to find bad news more motivational than good. To seek it out.

If your ancestors heard the rustle of a friendly breeze far away in the tall grass, and ran away, mistaking the breeze for a lion, this cost them very little. But if they heard the rustle of a lion in the tall grass, and mistook it for a friendly breeze, this would cost them their lives. Seeing potential bad news behind every harmless breeze is a survival instinct.

Here are a few selections from Ridley's Rational Optimist: Page 27: Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

When a stampeding herd of cattle were coming your way, it didn't much matter what had caused the stampede. You only had to know that no argument would alter its course, no persuasion would save your life if you were standing in its path. Recinos

At the heart of which attitude lies the strange retributive instinct of our time towards the past which suggests that we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and we know that we would have behaved better. There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here.

What would you do if your cat suddenly went psycho and started to attack you for no apparent reason, lying in wait and pouncing or stalking you with a faraway look reminiscent of its predatory cousins and ancestors?

I don't know why I do stuff sometimes. Sometimes I go by the numbers. Sometimes I go on what I feel. Sometimes I go on what I hope.

Reaction" is convenient verbal shorthand for "I desire to behave in a particular way."—I may not act, you understand. But the impulse is with me. If, magically, all my restraints and inhibitions were to vanish, I'd embrace the woman, soothe the dog, throw out the cereal, weep or laugh or throw a temper tantrum.

Sometimes you gotta go with your first instinct. You gotta go with your gut. That's kind of how I live my life, you gotta go with your gut.

We always know which is the best road to follow, but we follow only the road that we have become accustomed to.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

Barrons had just given me the most carnal, sexually charged hungry look I'd ever seen in my life, and I was pretty sure he didn't even know he had done it.

Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

It's pure instinct that makes me rebel every time someone tries to control my life and hand out more rules.

I came into this life, looked all around. I saw just what I liked and took what I found.

Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.

First thought is best in Art, second in other matters.

I approach everything in my life the same way; if it feels right, I know it.

What is most important when the time comes - and it always will - is to live your life with the coldness of a wolf.

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

There will come a point in everyone's life , however, where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why but one must accept intuition as a fact.