Instinctual Quotes & Sayings

Since I began my practice of Forgiveness Therapy, it's now instinctual for me to choose to eat like I love myself - instead of eating like I wanted to punish myself. Plus I've not only lost weight, I've lost the anger and anxiety I was feeling, and so I feel happier and calmer within. — Karen Salmansohn

Lent is a time to renew wherever we are in that process that I call the divine therapy. It's a time to look what our instinctual needs are, look at what the dynamics of our unconscious are. — Thomas Keating

My whole life has been instinctual for me. I wouldn't do well in the computer world. My children look at me for a question and then they quickly look away because they know that I'm not going to know how to make Super Mario or do anything. — Kevin Costner

I'd call my work 'instinctual design.' I like to find the spirit of a piece that defies time, age, and occasion. My clothes give the wearer the chance to develop their own voice within a wardrobe, and I think of them as curators of their personal style. — Chris Benz

And maybe love is terrifying. I'm terrified now, but not in the way she would think.
I'm terrified because I hate who she is and what she's done, I do, and yet there is still something strong and powerful between us, some kind of deep, primal bond that won't end, won't snap or break or change, it just remains there inside me, as sold and factual as my blood and bones - she is my mother, I am her daughter - and I don't know what to call it because it doesn't feel like love, not the good kind I felt for Ellie, with all my heart, but instead an instinctual pull that's been there from the beginning, drawing me back to her again and again, the woman who has hurt me like no one else ever could, and now she's dying and the bond is still here, inside me, and I won't call it love or hate because emotions has nothing to do with the fact that she is my mother and I am her daughter, and we will be connected in that way forever. — Laura Wiess

Steve Jobs was Galileo in a past life. Discovery was instinctual for him. — Sylvia Browne

It is in the instinctual interpretation of voice and personality that we form our judgments of others. Nothing beats that. Not fingerprints, not DNA, not the pointed finger of an eyewitness. — Michael Connelly

I love showing up and giving a performance without the benefit of a lot of rehearsal or dissection. It's fun to me to act on a kind of instinctual level and go straight for the performance. — Ron Perlman

The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation. — Sigmund Freud

To sublime: to pass directly from the solid to the vapor state.
To sublimate: to divert the expression of an instinctual desire or impulse from its primitive form to one that is considered more socially or culturally acceptable.
Sublime: of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth. — Rachel Klein

There are things that defy logic. Things that speak to the instinctual fear cloaked by our conscious minds. — Mary Lindsey

Just as a satisfaction of instinct spells happiness for us, so severe suffering is caused us if the external world lets us starve, if it refuses to sate our needs. One may therefore hope to be freed from a part of one's sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses. — Sigmund Freud

Something instinctual in me sensed evil in the house. Perhaps it spoke to my own darkness. — Mary Lindsey

women were considered instinctual nurses in this generation - the field had received exciting publicity during the Spanish-American War when an Army Nursing Corps had served overseas in the Philippines. Clara Weeks-Shaw, the author of a popular textbook on nursing, promoted the field as "a new activity for women - congenial, honorable and remunerative and with permanent value to them in the common experience of domestic life."3 In readable language, Weeks-Shaw presented nursing as an artful balance between self-reliance and submission. Overall its practices were an extension of maternity, requiring the classic female behaviors of cheerfulness (to the patients) and obedience (to the doctors). "Never leave a doctor alone with a gynecology patient except at his request," went one injunction. — Jean H. Baker

You can't sit there and feel bad for yourself and say, "But, it's just not coming to me." That's an instinctual thing to do because that's the way the business normally works. But, when you've got a good brain on your shoulders, I think you can make it happen. — Katie Aselton

Biological instincts are the key to understanding how every single human being is wired. The marvelous interplay of various brain circuits creates our instinctual reality of the daily life. If you're conscious about the fact that there lies a complex yet vividly beautiful brain circuit mechanism behind every single impulse of your daily emotions, then you can choose how to react upon each of those impulses. You can thus program your behavioral response in a certain situation. — Abhijit Naskar

Understand - motherhood, for a dog, is not an emotional experience, it is an instinctual experience. — Anonymous

It's a writer's or director's role to be cerebral, whereas for an actor it should be a visceral, gut thing. When the action starts, it's best to turn the brain off and let it become an instinctual thing. — Natalie Dormer

I think a lot of the inspirations for me are very instinctual and subconscious. I don't over intellectualize stuff much. It's a very instinctual thing. — Neill Blomkamp

But, really, such an uprooting is instinctual. Time to rebel. Internal gears began to grind, propelling you forward - then you invent the reasons. My — Frances Mayes

the key problem of psychology is that of the specific kind of relatedness of the individual towards the world and not that of the satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per se — Erich Fromm

When I was 9 or 10, I used to get all the lead roles because I was the tallest person. But my interest in music soon drew me to country music. I was infatuated with the sound, with the storytelling. I could relate to it. I can't really tell you why. With me, it was just instinctual. — Taylor Swift

Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail. — Herbert Marcuse

for to have a deep attachment for a person (or a place or thing) is to have taken them as the terminating object of our instinctual responses."
Separation anxiety. International Journal of Psycho-Analysts, XLI, 1-25 (1959( — John Bowlby

If you sit there and you know that rule #1 is just that everything you do is honest and is just a natural and instinctual extension of yourself, then there you go. — Lars Ulrich

The instinctual nature tells us when enough is enough. It is prudent and life preserving....sometimes it is difficult for us to realize when we are losing our instincts, for it is often an insidious process that does not occur all in one day, but rather over a long period of time. Too, the loss or deadening of instinct is often entirely supported by the surrounding culture, and sometimes even by other women who endure the loss of instinct as a way of achieving belonging in a culture that keeps no nourishing habitat for the natural woman. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

As the instinctual nature of the bird dictates the building of a nest, so the instinctual nature of the in-love experience pushes us to do outlandish and unnatural things for each other. — Gary Chapman

To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences our conscious experience of the world in the most fundamental of ways: how we view ourselves and others, the meanings we attach to the everyday events of our lives, our ability to make the quick judgment calls and decisions that can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and the actions we engage in as a result of all these instinctual experiences. — Leonard Mlodinow

The mistrust we have in our intuitive abilities leaves us, like sheep, extremely vulnerable. Our culture's present emphasis on the importance of intellect at the expense of instinctual knowing has rendered us defenseless. We have crippled ourselves in our hesitation to mobilize our instincts, even when to do so would save our lives. We — Adele Von Rust McCormick

necessarily surface in conscious awareness, because this type of anticipation resides in the deep and wordless part of the brain. Much of what we do as partners is fundamentally about survival and our beastly, instinctual selves. In fact, we could say the human species has survived over millennia due to the simple imperative "Thou shall not get killed." Love and war are both conditions of our human brain. Arguably, though, the brain is wired first and foremost for war, rather than for love. Its primary function is to ensure we survive as individuals and as a species. And it is very, very good at this. — Stan Tatkin

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process. — A. Bartlett Giamatti

Everything I do in my life is very instinctual and in the moment. If I'm attracted to something, that's it. If I have reservations, those don't change till they're resolved. My first impression is how I go. — Andy Garcia

Creation is a sentient and instinctual flow that determines where to go and what to change or omit. — Shaun McNiff

biological, instinctual, unconscious response to threat or violation. And it can actually be the very thing that saves your life. In freezing, the human body enters an altered state in which little to no pain is experienced. — Rachael Maddox

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way. — John Banville

Casting is very instinctual. I really like to meet people. To me, it's about their essence more than their audition. — Francesca Gregorini

It was as if her heart had some instinctual longing for misery and pain. — Julie Plec

Your voice is yours, how dare you let another speak for you.
Your heart is yours, how dare you give it away, so freely to another you hardly know.
Your soul is yours, how dare you ignore its instinctual truth.
Your mind is yours, don't let the world make it negative.
You are the master of your fate, you are the creator of your destiny, don't hand the keys to anyone, rather open the door and welcome them to taste your paradise within. — Nikki Rowe

We say it is the nature of the thing.Yet we find this destructive process exacerbated when the culture surrounding a women touts , nourishes, and protects destructive attitudes towards the deep instinctual and soulful nature. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalization" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. — Viktor E. Frankl

Although her father had told her of the nature of the one who waited for her, she could not control an instinctual shudder of fear when she saw him, for a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty and, besides, they have no respect for us: why should they? Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them, and some kind of sadness in his agate eyes, that looked almost blind, as if sick of sight, moved her heart. — Angela Carter

When I first started writing comics, in the way-back days, Typhoid Mary was my explosive response to women characters in comics - I made her an innocent virginal type, a clever, dark, liberated woman, and as Bloody Mary, a feminist bent of punishing men - all in one character. She was an instinctual rather than a calculated creation. — Ann Nocenti

Actors aren't all the same. They have very different skills. There are actors of intellect who are very thoughtful about everything they do ... and then there are actors of instinct who don't know what they're doing until the cameras roll ... My father was actually quite thoughtful about what he did, while my mother was much more instinctual. — Campbell Scott

I thought it was a fleeting emotion, something that eventually fades like lust. Now I know that real love is when the soul meets its true mate. True and undeniable. It's as instinctual as the need to eat, sleep or breathe. Like a puzzle piece that only fits in one place, you are my home, the only place I belong. You are it for me. My true. — Gwendolyn Grace

Freud's translator accidentally omitted 'fashion' in the psychoanalytic list of primary instinctual drives; along with the drive to sexuality there is the drive to wear odd garments that may cut off circulation, occlude vision, make toes grow sideways, cause riots. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Without thinking, I asked, "Are you afraid of temptation?"
He shook his head. "God, no. Just being with you, just seeing you. Fuck." He mostly swallowed the expletive, his hips rolling in a way that made me think the movement was instinctual, then added on a rush, "You breathing tempts me. — Penny Reid

The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis. — Julia Kristeva

I didn't want someone who would have to force himself to love me or for me to pretend that I loved him back. I had always hoped that love would be mutually instinctual and natural- as easy as breathing — Tina Reber

Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. — Sigmund Freud

A mother's love is instinctual, unconditional, and forever. — Revathi Sankaran

Abortion is green! I think its irrefutable, but people don't want to hear that. For most people, having children is an instinctual, natural desire and the last thing they want to do is believe that it has any detrimental side, or if they do believe it, they think it's different for them because they live in a gated community or whatever the reason ... — Doug Stanhope

Or how about this hypothetical definition. Reason is a complex type of instinct that has not yet formed completely. This implies that instinctual behavior is always purposeful and natural. A million years from now our instinct will have matured and we will stop making the mistakes that are probably integral to reason. An then, if something should change in the universe, we will all become extinct - precisely because we will have forgotten how to make mistakes, that is, to try various approaches not stipulated by an inflexible program of permitted alternatives. — Arkady Strugatsky

Our instinctual understanding of reality is the same as most other animals. — Robert Lanza

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. — Sigmund Freud

Sure that there was an attainable bliss somewhere beyond the decimal point in the p of his sexual trysts, I felt that maybe he had already attained what I was looking for, a more instinctual regard for sex, an equality among thirsts. He had done what I wanted to do: washed the wound of appetite in a relentless waterfall of sweat and semen. — Tom Cardamone

Creativity reduces instinctual tension, it fuses pleasure with reality, and satisfies the libido. — Peter Shepherd

The understanding of it [absolute] is very important as a beginning point. Then you can use meditation, further reasoning, long-term familiarity etc., you can use all kinds of methods to deepen this understanding and to have it counter the instinctual sense of being an absolute you. — Robert Thurman

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

That's just something instinctual within men. We always feel like we've got to protect our stuff. Even if it's not worth protecting, we want to protect it. You ever seen people who have like a piece of crap Pinto with a Club on the steering wheel. Somebody breaks the window, steals the Club, leaves the Pinto in a pile of glass. — Jeff Foxworthy

Their wine was probably the best I'd ever had, and I was quickly coming to the conclusion that the creation of alcohol was probably an instinctual trait throughout all intelligent life.

A silly concept, I know, but it had to be more than a coincidence that every world I'd ever been to had some form of alcoholic beverage. It was as if the first thing creatures did when they achieved a level of intelligence that no longer required them spending their entire lives scavenging for food or reproducing, was look for ways to get fucked up. — Terra Whiteman

The whole gestural system of work was also obscene, in sharp contrast to the miniaturized and abstract gestural system of control to which it has now been reduced. The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects. Thus the handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes 'contouring' - the term is typical in its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual - merely manipulable. At that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his power. — Jean Baudrillard

There is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour. — C. G. Jung

Maybe we'll evolve to a point where fear as an experience is no longer instinctual, but rather an emotion we use to enrich our understanding of why our human ancestors killed each other when they could have loved each other. One day we'll be holding hands instead of grudges; we'll eliminate our territorial circuits and know what love is. One day we'll be holding hands instead of M-16s. — Oliver Hart

Love is neither a conditional business nor an ever-fixed mark arrangement. People always know somewhere inside them if they are not loved. No gestures, talk, conciliation, pronouncements can prevail over that deep instinctual knowledge. — Elizabeth Jane Howard

Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction. — Christopher Hitchens

The analytic psychotherapist thus has a threefold battle to wage
in his own mind against the forces which seek to drag him down from the analytic level; outside the analysis, against opponents who dispute the importance he attaches to the sexual instinctual forces and hinder him from making use of them in his scientific technique; and inside the analysis, against his patients, who at first behave like opponents but later on reveal the overvaluation of sexual life which dominates them, and who try to make him captive to their socially untamed passion. — Sigmund Freud

I believe it's our loss of connection with our instinctual side that prevents us from being effective pack leaders for our dogs. Perhaps it's also why we also seem to be failing at being positive guardians of our planet. — Cesar Millan

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there. — Paloma Picasso

I've never formally trained in acting, so I'm very instinctual and visceral with decisions. — Brittany Murphy

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest. — Nate Silver

The most important thing for me is the tone, the feeling, the pace. But why I'm doing this is not very clear to me. It's much more of an instinctual thing than an analytical process. — Eran Kolirin

We may insist as often as we like that man's intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. — Sigmund Freud

Reason must sit at the knee of instinct and learn reverence for the miraculous instinctual capacity for creation. — Jonathan Schell

You have put yourself at risk to activate your instinctual genius. — Bryant McGill

The parts of my mind that apply logic and understanding had somehow abandoned me, and something primitive and instinctual took control. — Danielle Rohr

I have to birth those ideas. Those designs have to come into the world. It's not only my goal, it's my reason for being on the planet. If I'm not doing them, then I'm not fulfilling my calling. It's very instinctual for me. — Jeremy Scott

Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted. A — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for the instinctual drives must be satisfied. — Cyril Connolly

I'm an instinctual actor. I don't really talk about it. Usually if I get a script and I'm having trouble with it, I go to sleep and I dream about it because I'm super internal with the way I work. — Megyn Price

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. — Sigmund Freud

It isn't a first kiss. It isn't even their first kiss. But it feels like one.
Not because it is fumbling or awkward. Not because she doesn't know where to put her hand, or he doesn't know where to put his nose. None of those. They slot together like puzzle pieces. As Allyson and Willem kiss for the first time in a year, both are thinking the same thing: This feels new.
Though perhaps thinking is not the right term, because with a kiss like this, thinking goes out the window and something more instinctual takes over: inner voices, gut instincts. 'Knowing it in your kishkes' is how Willem's saba would've described it.
In his kishkes, Willem is marveling at how Allyson found him, as Yael found Bram. He doesn't know how it happened, only that it did happen and that it means something. — Gayle Forman

I find that the acting's getting easier - with experience, everything is more instinctual. — Ewan McGregor

It's moments like these that define the true nature of a person. The world seemingly spinning out of control, your mind darting from one issue to another. Instinctual priority takes over. Situations such as these will reveal a man's soul. — Dylan Lee Peters

I don't really have a method or a technical process. I studied [Sanford] Meisner, and that's the thing that really works for me. That sort of instinctual, in the moment, what the other actors do, working off them and letting the story unfold, as opposed to having an idea of what the story should be. — Maria Bello

I feel constricted if I become too much aware of the act of making. Liberty is lost and instead of an instinctual lyrical expression the whole thing becomes arid. — William Scott

It's time that we acknowledge the wisdom women have acquired by managing the chaos of daily life. Women are realists, the glue that holds society together. They bring a reverence to life that's instinctual, not just intellectual. — Teresa Heinz

He'd always loved this: a woman's elemental effect on him, as a man. He used to live for these moments of raw, instinctual attraction. When a source of celestial-grade femininity wandered into the room, and his internal compass recalibrated. It was a sublime shift from internal chaos to single-minded determination. The difference between Ye gods, what next? and ...
Her. I'll take her. — Tessa Dare

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man ... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture. — Sigmund Freud

I'm pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I'm writing where I don't know what's going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really like. — Brian Evenson

Your natural instinct, from your broadest Nonphysical perspective, is to know your power. Fear is a vibration when you feel powerless. Your natural instinctual Nonphysical vibration is to know your worthiness, know your rightness, know your value. And the feeling of fear is always when you are contradicting that thought. — Esther Hicks

I am often accused of being childish. I prefer to interpret that as child-like. I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things. I tend to exaggerate and fantasize and embellish. I still listen to instinctual urges. I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind. I never water my garden without soaking myself. It has been after such times of joy that I have achieved my greatest creativity and produced my best work. — Leo Buscaglia

I hear about actors being exterior actors and actors being instinctual actors and I always think it's crap. Anybody who knows anything about it knows that good actors do both - they do inside-outward and they do outside-inward. You can't not do both. — Edward Norton

Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but ... a powerful measure of desire for aggression had to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment. — Sigmund Freud

I think that much of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with what John writes about: the soul's need and longing for transcendence. This need is instinctual and unavoidable. — Mirabai Starr

To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots - the outsized equivalents of ants. — Edward O. Wilson

The lust for murder is not a rational thing. In queens, it is an instinctual response. — Laurie R. King

I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings. — George R R Martin

I like being independent; I like doing things myself. I'm an instinctual person. — Cathy Moriarty

The apostle Paul claimed the Law is written on the 'fleshy tables' of the human heart (2 Cor. 3:3 KJV). What he meant are these 'shoulds' and 'shouldn'ts' are both instinctual and inescapable, part of our DNA. They are a psychological reality. We may justify our actions away, but deep down, we know when we've done something wrong. — Tullian Tchividjian