Quotes About Instincts

For Spenser, the perpetual human dilemma seems to stem from what he regards as the two ultimate demands of our physical nature, the need to labor and the need to relax and have pleasure, the aggressive and the permissive instincts which Professor Nelson has identified as the 'forward' and the 'forward passions.

A strah i nemoc radjaju niske nagone.

We are professionally admonished to freeze many of our ordinary human instincts, to distance ourselves from too much personal knowledge of or contact with the people we write about, lest we endanger our objectivity or adulterate our product with an excess of understanding of their behavior or, God forbid, sympathy.

Trust your instincts, trust your judgment.

If I can't forgive birth mother, how can I be out in the world arguing for love, justice, and community? How can I hold her hostage away from my heart for something she did when she was so young? My instincts are to stay angry, but my heart says that anger is the road to ruin.

Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out.

Cruelty lurks in our instincts, and fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty. Fanatics are seldom genuinely humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a fanatical creed. . . .

Wishes cannot be summoned up or kept away at will. They come from deeper within us than good or bad intentions. And they spring up unannounced.

Anyone can lose weight eating less food. Anyone can be starved thin. Starvation diets are rarely sustainable, though, since hunger pangs drive us to eat. We feel unsatisfied on low-calorie diets. Unsatiated. We do have some level of voluntary control, but our deep-seated instinctual drives may win out in the end. For

She couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Her primal instincts eliminated all extraneous functions not related to her immediate survival.

Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas.

Fear is an old word that derives from the same roots that give us "fare," as in "thoroughfare." Although it often causes people to run away from troubling situations, at a deeper level, fear means "to go through it." The hidden purpose of fear involves bringing us closer to natural instincts for survival, but also for awakening inner resources and sharpening our intelligence when faced with true danger and the basic need to change.

we eat not so much for pleasure as we do to ward off an awful feeling...The fear of hunger is deeply rooted, and food manufacturers know well how to push the buttons that evoke this fear.

If democratic people are naturally brought toward peace by their interests and instincts, they are constantly drawn to war and revolutions by their armies." I

You try to understand human behavior. You try to explain it. Not me. I know we're smaller than gorillas, bigger than chimps, worse than both of them and, for all our rationality, our rules and laws, our baser drives are still straight out of the jungle.

I will argue that consciousness is not a thing. "Consciousness" is the word we use to describe the subjective feeling of a number of instincts and/or memories playing out in time in an organism. That is why "consciousness" is a proxy word for how a complex living organism operates. And, to understand how complex organisms work, we need to know how brains' parts are organized to deliver conscious experience as we know it.

The list is long, and we humans seem to have more instincts than other creatures.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711

company built around the instincts, impulses, and gambles of its leader?

The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.

We are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.

We're all born brave, trusting, and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.

Work not only transforms the environment by building bridges across rivers and cultivating barren plains; it also transforms the worker from an animal guided by instincts into a conscious, goal-directed, skillful person.

A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. Instead of deciding how to act in terms of personal goals, he has to surrender to the things that his body has been programmed (or misprogrammed) to do.