His universal compassion was due less to natural instinct, than to a profound conviction, a sum of thoughts that in the course of living had filtered through to his heart: for in the nature of man, as in rock, there may be channels hollowed by the dropping of water, and these can never be destroyed.
Instinct Quotes (512 Quotes)
Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.
Oh darling, don't be bitter. It's the first instinct of the weak.
Each human being is unique, each with their own qualities, instincts, forms of pleasure, and desire for adventure. However, society always imposes on us a collective ways of behaving, and people never stop to wonder why they should behave like that. They just accept it, the way typists accepted the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was the best possible one. Have you ever met anyone is your entire life who asked why the hands of a clock should go in one particular direction and not the other?
Arboreal, a fine word. Our arboreal ancestors, Crake used to say. Used to shit on their enemies from above while perched in trees. All planes and rockets and bombs are simply elaborations on that primate instinct.
The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination.
Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.
And of course she understood now why her body wanted to run whenever he appeared. It was a correct instinct, for there was nothing to be got from this but sadness.
We now had three girls and one testosterone-pumped guy bird that spent every walking minute doing of of three things: pursuing sex, having sex or crowing boastfully about the sex he had just scored. Jenny observed that roosters are what men would be if left to their own devices, with no social conventions to rein in their baser instincts, and I couldn't disagree. I had to admit, I kind of admired the lucky bastard.
He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.
Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.
The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering. He still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men.
You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelegence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or instinct, or simply because he had been tuitored into it, or by any intermixture of all of these , even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb , sponteneous literal process.
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
What is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of decaying nature, or the soul's impulsive throb, as immortality draws on? Be what it may, it rested in the heart of Eva, a calm, sweet, prophetic certainty that Heaven was near; calm as the light of sunset, sweet as the bright stillness of autumn, there her little heart reposed, only troubled by sorrow for those who loved her so dearly.
The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the more she did away with fashion in search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more provocative she become to men.
The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand.
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
If you are deemed insane, then all actions that would oherwise prove you are not do, in actuality, fall into the framework of an insane person's actions. Your sound protests constitute denial. Your valid fears are deemed paranoia. Your survival instincts are labeled defense mechanisms. It's a no-win situation. It's a death penalty really.
His defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were abeyance he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow struggling helplessly
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
You picked the seats you did for a reason, right? Familiarity. Too bad the best sleuths avoid familiarity. It dulls the investigative instinct.
There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.
As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.
Your instinct, rather than precision stabbing, is more about just random bludgeoning.
No matter what sport, even Little League (baseball), I was always the smallest player on the team, ... I don't think size matters that much in football. It's all about your heart and instincts.
What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.
We did what we were supposed to do. We got the lead and got it up to 19, and then we just kind of put it on cruise control. We did that both halves. We've got to have a killer instinct.
Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
My first instinct was the play it on a hop. But it hung up long enough for me to make a play on it.
Reason is a passion; an instinct, a drive.
So his choices are he can do nothing and sort of fudge it -- but you can't get away with that. The public and Congress are going to want something done. ... I've said this about Bud, and I think I'm right, his first instinct is always wrong. The second is almost always right.
Barbara is one of the most astute and successful programming executives in the industry. She has terrific creative instincts, excellent industry relationships and the management skills necessary to further advance the goals of our expanding television business.
Well thanks, there'll be more of that. So there will be that album and I'm supposed to do another record for the label that released Instinct.
I guess it's part of a person's instincts. If they want to hustle after the ball, if they're going to dive on the ball or they're going to give 110 percent all the time, that's probably within the individual. And it really doesn't take a lot out of me, because I'm so used to doing it, and I want to get the job done and I always want to do the best I can.
An awful call, ... Offensively, I go with my instincts. If I think the play is to make a play, that's what I do. It didn't work out. I'm just going to keep playing hard. If I get benched for it, that's fine.
We haven't got that killer instinct. I'm fed up of throwing games away.
But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere one is intimate with him by instinct.
Trust your instincts. If you have no instincts, trust your impulses.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.
He has some talent there running the ball. I don't want him to make a habit of it, but with a first-year quarterback, the thought process speeds up and typically the first instinct is to run.
Wayne is a fantastic player. He is a midfielder's dream. You lose count of the amount of times I look up and he is in the 'hole' and you can give him any sort of ball and he will bring it down and turn and make things happen. You can't buy that sort of quality. He is a one-off in that way. He is one of the best in the world at doing that. I am sure opponents are wary of what he can do and when you are facing a player of that ability and that instinct, you don't want to dive in on him. It's a good thing if teams are scared of him.
How could we not ... The Whitney for 70 years has followed the instincts of American artists.
Boxing brings out my aggressive instinct, not necessarily a killer instinct.
My gut instinct is that the Australian dollar will wobble a bit lower from here. The interest rate differential is slowly being eroded. The Australian dollar is now less attractive to overseas investors.
That sounds great and that's our plan. But we feel we have to improve from Game 1. We feel we can play much better than that. Playoff series are tough. Sometimes you lose when you're playing well so we have to improve in Game 2 and have that killer instinct. If we play the way we did in the third period we'll be fine.
If he was 30 years old, I would still be impressed. He's just one of those kids who has that instinct. Everybody sees it and knows he is going to be special. It's just a matter of him being consistent and being able to bring those five tools to the game every night. And he can. He will be a superstar in the league.
You know grief. You've had it in your own life. But I don't use it directly. It's processed through my acting instincts, the bit of me that knows about those things, so when it comes out it's not my grief that you're seeing, it's the grief of that character. It's active imagination.