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Instinct Quotes

Browse 2328 quotes about Instinct.

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Instinct Quotes

“Everything is an idea for something, something that touches the imagination, a fact that seems relevant or maybe just a statement I find interesting — either because it resonates or because I disagree. All of it is fodder for continued work or thinking on the topics. It’s also important to me to record the ideas that my instincts tell me are bad.”

ThinkingImportantIdeasFactsSeemsImaginationInterestingRecordsInstinctStatementsDisagreeRelevantTopicsFodder
Author:Elizabeth Spiers
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“I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.”

PeopleIfsBodyWould BeRunningYoungGuyPowerfulWeaponsMassGunInstinctFollowingShootingThings To DoGangVery PowerfulUnarmedShooterPowerful WeaponsMass Shootings
Author:Megan McArdle
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“I hope to make pictures like I walk in the desert—under a spell, an instinct of motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways.Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home–not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.”

WorldFeelsKindStoriesHomeLightFormCertainFallWalksKnowingBloodLandColorPerceptionClaimsInstinctFalling In LoveHardestDesertInternalsMapsSpellsSeductionGeographyIndirectSideways
Author:Ellen Meloy
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“Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately.”

HumansJobsHuman BeingsAnswersOppositesInstinctEaseTension
Book:Stein On Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies
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“With impeccable timing and a fine instinct for the telling detail, Francesca Abbate evokes the plenitudes and the deprivations of human habitation, the nurturing richness of landscape, and the soul-wound wrought by casual defacement. Abbate has a superb capacity for distillation and a mastery of poetic line, and her diction is remarkably flexible, accommodating both the demotic and the lyrical. Her poems are as consistent in quality as they are varied in pacing, surface, and tone. A fine first book.”

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Author:Linda Gregerson
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“A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.”

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Book:The Varieties of Religious Experience
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“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.”

HelpingMightSpiritFatherIndividualMassRootsInstinctGravityParticlesOur FatherMemories Dreams ReflectionsForefathers
Book:Memories, dreams, reflections
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“Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.”

DoeReasonUsePurposeOrderNaturalLevelsPracticeProgressCreaturesLimitsProjectsInstinctInsightTrialsAcknowledgeFacultyInstructionNatural Instinct
Book:Philosophical writings
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“Never before has a populist democracy attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.”

HumansWellsSelfPassionGoalChallengesEffortDemocracySacrificeEconomicConditionsThreatDemocraticInstinctSoldierInternationalSpendingDefensePursuitCommandWell BeingDenialSupremacyCasualtiesPopulistSelf-denialMobilizationDefense Spending
Author:Zbigniew Brzezinski
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“The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.”

FactsHateCoursesSpeakNaturalSimplePoetInstinctTerrifiedExaltedAlways WrongNatural Instinct
Book:Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion
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“Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray.”

MenWayMistakeKnownStepsInstinctIntuitionReasoningEvery StepChakraInstinct Intuition
Book:The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, Esq: Including the Hymns and Translations from Madame Guion, Milton, Etc., and Adam; a Sacred Drama; from the Italian of Gio. Battista Andreini, with a Memoir of the Author
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“It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.”

Has BeensNaturalAnimalHabitOrganizationStructureInstinctFixedCustomsAdaptedNatural History
Book:The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise
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“Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.”

MenHumansSeemsMightWould BeBeautifulSexLevelsExistenceWiseMoonBlueBraveInstinctDullHuman ExistenceImbecilesThrottleLevels Of LifeBlue Moon
Author:H. L. Mencken
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