Instinct Quotes - Page 25

• Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one's breath away.

  Michael Novak

  Reality, Discovery, Mind

  Michael Novak (1993). “The Joy of Sports: End Zones, Bases, Baskets, Balls, and the Consecration of the American Spirit”, p.172, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

  Clarence Darrow

  Action, Emotion, Humans

  Clarence Darrow (2015). “Crime: Its Cause and Treatment”, p.37, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Sensitive people never like the fatigue of justifying their instincts.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  People, Intuition, Sensitive

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1856). “Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp”, p.33

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• The point is that one's got an instinct to live. One doesn't live because one's reason assents to living. People who, as we say, 'would be better dead' don't want to die! People who apparently have everything to live for just let themselves fade out of life because they haven't got the energy to fight.

  Agatha Christie

  Fighting, People, Would Be

  Agatha Christie (1984). “Sad cypress”

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• Fear gives sudden instincts of skill.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Skills, Giving

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1957). “Notebooks”

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• As a man without forethought scarcely deserves the name of a man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase for the instinct of a beast.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Reflection, Men, Names

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge, John McVickar (1854). “Coleridge's Aids to reflection: with the author's last corrections”, p.2

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• Notwithstanding the sight of all our miseries, which press upon us and take us by the throat, we have an instinct which we cannot repress, and which lifts us up.

  Blaise Pascal

  Sight, Misery, Throat

  Blaise Pascal (2013). “Pascal's Pensees”, p.111, Simon and Schuster

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• The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses.

  Agnes Repplier

  Dog, Heart, Cat

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• The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.

  Kenneth Grahame

  Information, Strongest, Humans

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• I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

  Alan Bennett

  War, Scope, Establishment

  'Forty Years On' (1969) act 1

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• My conservatory is in the streets. My intelligence is instinct.

  Edith Piaf

  Streets, Conservatory

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• Morale is not a single instinct. It has many ingredients. A sense of personal responsibility, the natural courage of an individual, the amount of his acquired self-discipline -- and above all his interest in others -- these together make up the spirit of morale.

  Phyllis Bottome

  Responsibility, Self, Discipline

  Phyllis Bottome (1943). “Survival”, Boston : Little, Brown

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• Applause is an instinctive, unconscious act expressing the sympathy between actors and audience. Just as our art demands more instinct than intellect in its exercise, so we demand of those who watch us an apppreciation of the simple unconscious kind which finds an outlet in clapping rather than the cold intellectual approval which would self-consciously think applause derogatory. I have yet to meet the actor who was sincere in saying that he disliked applause.

  Ellen Terry

  Art, Exercise, Simple

  Dame Ellen Terry (1908). “The Story of My Life: Recollections and Reflections”

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• A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

  Margaret Halsey

  Struggle, Fighting, Men

  Margaret Halsey (1946). “Color blind: a white woman looks at the Negro”

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• The religious instinct will never be replaced by law or even philanthropy.

  Hugh Reginald Haweis

  Religious, Law, Religion

  Hugh Reginald Haweis (1875). “Speech in Season”, p.4

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• It reveals us to ourselves, it represents those modulations and temperamental changes which escape all verbal analysis, it utters what must else remain forever unuttered and unutterable; it feeds that deep, ineradicable instinct within us of which all art is only the reverberated echo, that craving to express, through the medium of the senses, the spiritual and eternal realities which underlie them.

  Hugh Reginald Haweis

  Music, Spiritual, Art

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• The instinct of interest is the universal instinct of mankind.

  Charles Macklin

  Mankind, Interest, Universal

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• There is no instinct that has been so maligned, suppressed, abused, and distorted by religious teaching as the instinct of sex.

  Dora Russell

  Religious, Sex, Teaching

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• I am filled with hatred for money, for battleships, for industry, for factories, for the grind, grind, grind of the machine on all our creative instincts.

  Dora Russell

  Creative, Hatred, Machines

  Dora Russell (1975). “The Tamarisk Tree: My quest for liberty and love”

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• I work on instinct. It's my best adviser.

  Princess Diana

  Intuition, Adviser

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• Women's thoughts are impelled by their feelings. Hence the sharp-sightedness, the direct instinct, the quick perceptions; hence also their warmer prejudices and more unbalanced judgments. In this the child is like the woman.

  Antoinette Brown Blackwell

  Children, Feelings, Perception

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• In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears).

  Ana Castillo

  Cat, Self, Ideas

  Ana Castillo (1990). “Sapogonia: (an Anti-romance in 3/8 Meter)”, Bilingual Press

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• One puzzling thing about men -- they allow their sex instinct to drive them to where their intelligence never would take them.

  Joan Fontaine

  Sex, Men, Puzzling

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• the anxiety arising from the perpetual activity of the death instinct, though never eliminated, is counteracted and kept at bay by the power of the life instinct.

  Melanie Klein

  Life And Death, Anxiety, Activity

  Melanie Klein (2002). “Envy and Gratitude”, p.42, Simon and Schuster

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• Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.

  Josephine Tey

  Horse, Men, Gambling

  Josephine Tey (1954). “Three by Tey”

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