Quotes About Instinct

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

Men like to provide for women and their families. It's in their DNA. I'm obviously no scientist, but I bet if you could hear a Y-chromosome talk, it would say, 'I want to provide and hunt.' When the woman is the primary breadwinner, it's going against nature. I'm not saying that it's bad or wrong, I'm just saying that it can feel off.

the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

Old Marcus still managed to function with disquieting resilience. Some never-atrophying instinct warned hi of danger, of gangings up against him--he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it. Nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete.

Art isn't meaningless. - It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. - In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand peopled with ghosts. - Give a good show anyhow. - On the contrary, I'd feel, it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?

it's the paternal instinct, Amory—celibacy goes deeper than the flesh. . . .

For a full minute, our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth--like some nightmare attempt to attach our naval cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation. -Cecelia Brady describing the earthquake

To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in your heart.

If you cage a wild thing, you can be sure it will die, but if you let it run free, nine times out of ten it will run back home.

Show the politicians a picture of a rat, and they immediately identify.

Eis-me aqui! O que há para mim senão vacuidade No mundo (...), o que me destinastes? O vazio? O silêncio? A escuridão? Desses-me o instinto deles, não a plena Torturação da luz.

253. … the sacred instinct of having no theories … 254

dieser heilige Instinkt, der uns veranlasst, keine Theorien zu haben...

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are the truly happy men, because they have all renounced their personality — the first because he lives by instinct, which is impersonal, the second because he lives through his imagination, which is oblivion, and the third because he does not live and, not yet having died, sleeps.

La verdad es que son precisamente los animales quienes sólo emplean el sexo para procrear

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

Parker had an extra sense that told him when there was a woman nearby watching him.

The idea of wanting to do something that's completely natural and then having to repress it is something that I find fascinating.

The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.

I don't know why I run so fast. I just run.

I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go', and I went.

The fighter is born. He cannot be made.

You can't second-guess yourself as a filmmaker.