Instinct Quotes - Page 9

• 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.

  Joseph Addison

  Discovery, Talent, Reason

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steel (1840). “Selections from the Spectator: Embracing the Most Interesting Papers by Addison, Steel, and Others”, p.52

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• Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts ... good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don't hurt. They're not painful. That's not just with somebody you want to marry, but it's with the friends that you choose. It's with the people you surround yourselves with.

  Michelle Obama

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Strong Women

  Remarks by the First Lady at an Event with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Students, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. May 25, 2011.

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• Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve been passed by.

  Clayton Christensen

  Past, Leader, Risk

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• The belief in a political Utopia is especially dangerous. This is possibly connected with the fact that the search for a better world, like the investigation of our environment, is (if I am correct) one of the oldest and most important of all the instincts.

  Karl Popper

  Political, Important, Facts

  Karl Popper (2012). “In Search of a Better World: Lectures and Essays from Thirty Years”, p.28, Routledge

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• Children have an unerring instinct for knowing when they are being patronized. They go immediately on the defensive against head-patting adults who treat them like strange beings.

  Art Linkletter

  Children, Knowing, Adults

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• If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.

  Bruce Chatwin

  Home, Men, Desert

  Bruce Chatwin (2012). “The Songlines”, p.162, Random House

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• There's no wrong move on stage. You can do no wrong if you just trust your instincts.

  Tim Meadows

  Moving, Stage, Can Do

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• I see with much pleasure that you are working on a large work on the integral Calculus ... The reconciliation of the methods which you are planning to make, serves to clarify them mutually, and what they have in common contains very often their true metaphysics; this is why that metaphysics is almost the last thing that one discovers. The spirit arrives at the results as if by instinct; it is only on reflecting upon the route that it and others have followed that it succeeds in generalising the methods and in discovering its metaphysics.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Science, Reflecting Upon, Lasts

  "Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800-1840:From the Calculus and Mechanics to Mathematical Analysis and Mathematical Physics. Vol.1: The Setting". Book by Grattan-Guinness, p. 139, July 1, 1990.

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• To have to fight the instincts - that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Happiness, Fighting, Long

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Twilight of the Idols”, p.27, Friedrich Nietzsche

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• Our human nature is profoundly phototropic. Men obey their deepest instincts when they hold fast to light.

  Gyorgy Kepes

  Men, Light, Human Nature

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• Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Poetry, Appeals, Primitive

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (1988). “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Poetry 1903-1920, prose, and unpublished writings”, p.425, Stanford University Press

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• Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

  Will Durant

  Men, Land, May

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1968). “The Lessons of History”

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• To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  Art, Personality, Purity

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• Masonry aims at the promotion of morality and higher living by the cultivation of the social side of man, the rousing in him of the instincts of charity and love of his kind. It rests surely on the foundation of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God.

  William Howard Taft

  Men, Brotherhood Of Man, Fatherhood

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• How can we be trusted with big things if we're not trustworthy with things that are small? Don't allow your finer instincts to become a casualty of the little everyday crimes of ethical compromise.

  Price Pritchett

  Trust, Everyday, Littles

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• My hope is that the generous instincts of unity will not depart from us...[so that we] become the prey of the little folk who exist in every country and who frolic alongside the Juggernaut car of war to see what fun or notoriety they can extract from the proceedings.

  Winston Churchill

  Country, Fun, War

  Sir Winston Churchill (1954). “Sir Winston Churchill: a self-portrait”

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• A personal injustice is stronger motivation than any instinct for philanthropy.

  John Irving

  Motivation, Stronger, Injustice

  John Irving (2012). “A Son Of The Circus”, p.103, Random House

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• I'm confident and I trust my instincts.

  Sachin Tendulkar

  Life, Success, Focus

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• It has taken a great deal of energy, which has not been so difficult to summon as the necessary patience to wait, simply wait much of the time - until my instincts assured me that I had assembled my materials in proper order for a final welding into their natural form.

  Hart Crane

  Patience, Taken, Order

  Hart Crane (1965). “Letters, 1916-1932”

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• To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.... In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings, and as soon as any object exhibits sufficient cognitive function, those instincts kick in and we react as though we were interacting with another sentient human being.

  Alan Cooper

  Rocks, People, Tree

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• Christianity has a hunter's instinct for finding out all those who by one means or another may be driven to despair -although only a part of mankind is capable of such despair. Christianity lies in wait for such as those and pursues them

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Lying, Mean, Waiting

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• I have not come to know atheism as a result of logical reasoning and still less as an event in my life: in me it is a matter of instinct.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Logical Reasoning, Religion, Atheism

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What”, p.19, Friedrich Nietzsche

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• She has good instincts, but wrong judgments. She'll rue the day.

  David O. Selznick

  Good Day, Rue, Judgment

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• The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."

  Sinclair Lewis

  Sports, Baseball, Games

  Sinclair Lewis (2008). “Babbitt (Volume 1 of 2) (EasyRead Super Large 18pt Edition)”, p.270, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

  Emile M. Cioran

  People, Doe, Facts

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