Quotes about Instinct

One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.

So it shows that for all the brag you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for real unerringness. Jim says the same.

Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy.

It will be best to start right and not let the record get confused, for some instinct tells me that these details are going to be important to the historian some day. For I feel like an experiment, I feel exactly like an experiment; it would be impossible for a person to feel more like an experiment than I do, and so I am coming to feel convinced that that is what I AM—an experiment; just an experiment, and nothing more.

But a girl always knows.

I have been pursuing my own train of thought for more than thirty years, undisturbed by all this, just because it is what I must do, and I could not do otherwise, out of an instinctive drive which is nonetheless supported by the confidence that what is thought truly and what throws light on obscurity will be grasped at some point by another thinking mind.XX

Certainly, if you look at human behavior around the world, you have to admit that we can be very aggressive.

Whims so often end in bankruptcy.

That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.

There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child — and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.

The desire of life and health is implanted in man's nature;- the love of liberty and enlargement is a sister-passion to it

THE WILD BOAR AND THE FOX A Wild Boar was engaged in whetting his tusks upon the trunk of a tree in the forest when a Fox came by and, seeing what he was at, said to him, Why are you doing that, pray? The huntsmen are not out to-day, and there are no other dangers at hand that I can see. True, my friend, replied the Boar, but the instant my life is in danger I shall need to use my tusks. There'll be no time to sharpen them then.