quotations about instinct
Reason is the judgment formed by experience; instinct is judgment ready-made.
P. YVON
attributed, Day's Collacon
Your survival instinct is working inside you right now. It's that programmed part of you that controls what to do intuitively to save yourself when necessary, such as get up and run out of a burning building. Rarely do you need to recruit this part of you today, because you seldom find yourself in situations that are truly life threatening.
MARC SCHOEN
Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You
Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.
JOSEPH ADDISON
"Instinct in Animals"
Where instinct fails, intellect must venture.
JIM BUTCHER
Storm Front
Instinct is the sensitive soul of beasts.
XIMENES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.
JOHN STERLING
"Thoughts and Images", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1838
You can have tons of talent, but it won't necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, though, you'll never go hungry.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84
An instinct is a propensity prior to experience and independent of instruction.
WILLIAM PALEY
Natural Theology
But honest instinct comes a volunteer;
Sure never to o'er-shoot, but just to hit,
While still too wide or short in human wit.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Man
Let men be wise by instinct if they can, but when this fails be wise by good advice.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
Animal instinct is the exertion of mental power without the exercise of reason.
H. SMITH
attributed, Day's Collacon
Shadows like these generated her first sensation of fear when she was a chick. She didn't have to learn to hate shadows from the sky. Nearly all dinosaurs are born with the same preprogrammed response. Those that are unfortunate enough to hatch with a mutant gene that eliminates the shadow-fear don't survive longer than a week. They are snatched from the nest by jaws from above.
ROBERT T. BAKKER
Raptor Red
A good man, through obscurest aspirations,
Has still an instinct of the one true way.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Faust
The mind, when compelled, by education or other circumstances, to receive irrational doctrines, has yet a power of keeping them, as it were, on its surface, of excluding them from its depths, of refusing to incorporate them with its own being; and when burdened with a mixed and incongruous system, it often discovers a sagacity which reminds us of the instinct of inferior animals, in selecting the healthful and nutritious portions, and in making them its daily food.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING
Thoughts