Instinct Quotes - Page 29

• Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
  That every man in arms should wish to be?
  It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
  Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
  Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
  Whose high endeavors are an inward light
  That makes the path before him always bright:
  Who, with a natural instinct to discern
  What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
  And in himself posses his own desire

  William Wordsworth

  Happiness, Real, Warrior

  'Character of the Happy Warrior' (1807)

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• Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

  Aldous Huxley

  Beautiful, Army, Power

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

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• What is commonly honored with the name of Friendship is no very profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, love their Friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not often transfigured and translated by love in each other's presence. I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a man.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Friendship, Wise, Wisdom

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.110, Penguin

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• As we grow older, we live more coarsely, we relax a little in our disciplines, and, to some extent, cease to obey our finest instincts. But we should be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Discipline, Relax, Littles

  Henry David Thoreau (1937). “The selected works of Thoreau”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Each reaching and aspiration is an instinct with which all nature consists and cöoperates, and therefore it is not in vain. But alas! each relaxing and desperation is an instinct too. To be active, well, happy, implies courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Courage, Fighting, Despair

  Henry David Thoreau (1894). “The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: With Bibliographical Introductions and Full Indexes”

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• Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diverting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.

  Honore de Balzac

  Thinking, Thoughtful, Intuition

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• A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Sex, Tragedy, Novelists

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• All empty souls tend to extreme opinion. It is only in those who have built up a rich world of memories and habits of thought that extreme opinions affront the sense of probability. Propositions, for instance, which set all the truth upon one side can only enter rich minds to dislocate and strain, if they can enter at all, and sooner or later the mind expels them by instinct.

  William Butler Yeats

  Memories, Soul, Mind

  William Butler Yeats (2010). “Autobiographies: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.347, Simon and Schuster

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• By a divine instinct, men's minds mistrust ensuing danger; as, by proof, we see the waters swell before a boisterous storm.

  William Shakespeare

  Men, Water, Mind

  William Shakespeare (2016). “King Richard III”, p.56, Pan Macmillan

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• One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.

  Joseph Addison

  Lying, Pride, Son

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steel (1858). “The Spectator”, p.169

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• You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhaps;but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.

  Mark Twain

  Bird, Feelings, Humanity

  Mark Twain (1994). “Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches”, p.163, Penguin

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• What joy when the insouciant
  armadillo glances at us and doesn't
  quicken his trotting
  across the track into the palm brush.
  What is this joy? That no animal
  falters, but knows what it must do?

  Denise Levertov

  Animal, Track, Joy

  Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Paul A. Lacey (2003). “Selected Poems”, p.19, New Directions Publishing

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• We heed no instincts but our own.

  Jean de La Fontaine

  Miscellaneous, Heed

  Jean de La Fontaine (1843). “Fables”, p.58

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• The earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.

  Herman Melville

  Wise, Children, Men

  Herman Melville (2016). “Pierre or The Ambiguities”, p.287, Herman Melville

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• To grant woman an equality with man in the affairs of life is contrary to every tradition, every precedent, every inheritance, every instinct and every teaching. The acceptance of this idea is possible only to those of especially progressive tendencies and a strong sense of justice, and it is yet too soon to expect these from the majority.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Strong, Teaching, Acceptance

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Gage, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Ida H. Harper (2017). “The Suffragettes – Complete History Of the Movement (6 Volumes in One Edition): The Battle for the Equal Rights: 1848-1922 (Including Letters, Newspaper Articles, Conference Reports, Speeches, Court Transcripts & Decisions)”, p.3972, e-artnow

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• Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?

  John Dos Passos

  Wise, Truth, Lying

  John Dos Passos (1973). “The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos”, Harvard Common Press

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• New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  New York, Men, Eyebrows

  Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (1995). “1949-1959”, Rizzoli International Publications

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• Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

  Charles Horton Cooley

  Kindness, Animal, Top Down

  Charles Horton Cooley (1992). “Human Nature and the Social Order”, p.158, Transaction Publishers

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• A man's jealousy is a social institution; a woman's prostitution is an instinct.

  Karl Kraus

  Jealousy, Sex, Men

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & one-and-a-half truths: selected aphorisms”

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• Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.

  Norman Mailer

  Courage, Ambition, Men

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• It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Causes, Glimpse

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• The neuro-physiological organization which we call instinct functions in a blindly mechanical way, particularly apparent when its function goes wrong.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Organization, Way, Function

  Konrad Lorenz (1966). “On aggressión”

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• If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.

  Charles Darwin

  Years, Practice, Tunes

  Charles Darwin (2016). “On the Origin of Species”, p.158, Zillmann Publishing

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• Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.

  John Ray

  Use, Reason

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• What a weak, credulous, incredulous, unbelieving, superstitious, bold, frightened, what a ridiculous world ours is, as far as concerns the mind of man. How full of inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities it is. I declare that taking the average of many minds that have recently come before me ... I should prefer the obedience, affections and instinct of a dog before it.

  Michael Faraday

  Dog, Men, Average

  Michael Faraday, F. James (1999). “The Correspondence of Michael Faraday, Volume 4: 1849-1855”, p.542, IET

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