The Life Instinct Quotes & Sayings

If he touches me, I'll kill him.
Rattle on a snake, a dog's growl to prevent a bite, her warning was meant to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and the burden of taking life, because as surely as the earth turned, if that man put a hand on her, instinct and history would overwhelm reason and she would destroy him or die trying. — Taylor Stevens

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience. — George Santayana

As soon as I'd walked out of my normal working life and into the apartment we now shared, I went to war with damn near every instinct I had. I handed over all control to the man I loved, trusting that he'd take care of us both. He always did, but sometimes I couldn't resist the urge to push back just a bit, so he knew I was still there, fighting. — Meredith Wild

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance. I strive to retrace my life to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or of gold, or the course of some subterranean stream, but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the memory. — Marguerite Yourcenar

It is a curious fact, and makes life very interesting, that, generally speaking, none of us have any expectation that things are going to happen till the very moment when they do happen. We wake up some morning with no idea that a great happiness is at hand, and before night it has come, and all the world is changed for us; or we wake bright and cheerful, with never a guess that clouds of sorrow are lowering in our sky, to put all the sunshine out for a while, and before noon all is dark. Nothing whispers of either the joy or the grief. No instinct bids us to delay or to hasten the opening of the letter or telegram, or the lifting of the latch of the door at which stands the messenger of good or ill. — Susan Coolidge

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about. — Rollo May

No person can grow rich in spiritual experience or can gain an intimate acquaintance with a God of purity and truth without negating the easy ways of instinct, the low pursuits of life which end in self, the habits of thought and action which limit and hamper the realization of the diviner possibilities of the whole nature. — Rufus M. Jones

I believe instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will. Unless you're willing to take the pipe or eat the gun or take a long walk off a short dock, you can't say no to some things. You can't refuse to pick up your option because there is no option. — Stephen King

Terror is the instinct that tells you to run, dear God, run, she murmured. Run for your life. But it just makes you into meat. Predators take the ones who run. Horror is the mind-thing, the worm of knowledge you can't stop turning over no matter how awful it is. It grows in your mind and destroys you by your own intelligence. — Kat Richardson

It taught me that Clinton's instinct to make this about your life as a citizen, rather than his as a human being, was the right answer to these things. — Paul Begala

And like the randomness of life's chaos, the decision to let him live was a coin toss. Just as she currently fought to get out from under the weight of her decision to allow Kate Breeden to live, so she might also one day again find herself in Lumani's crosshairs.
All she could do was walk the narrow line between instinct and conscience and hope for the best. — Taylor Stevens

But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible; to seek out the amusing and the touching: to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse - when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood appears on the walls - and it seemed that if at once, at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it, and she would die. — Vladimir Nabokov

What I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst of me. I am in a chaos of principles
groping in the dark
acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. — Thomas Hardy

The greatest decisions I've made in my life are by instinct. I remember when I hired Bill I had a lot of people telling me it was a mistake. But he and I had established a rapport in '96 when he coached the secondary. You need a coach that understands economics, that understands the impact of the salary cap and how to make those difficult decisions that allow you to sustain success over the long term. I don't think there's anyone better than Bill at doing that. — Robert Kraft

The charities of life are scattered everywhere, enameling the vales of human beings as the flowers paint the meadows. They are not the fruit of study, nor the privilege of refinement, but a natural instinct. — George Bancroft

Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity. He has developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually cling to life or discard life just as life happens to promise great pleasure or pain. — Jack London

We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life ... We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence — Mikhail Bakunin

The difference between a fairly interesting writer and a fascinating writer is that the fascinating writer has a better nose for what genuinely excites him, he is hotter on the trail, he has a better instinct for what is truly alive in him. The worse writer may seem to be more sensible in many ways, but he is less sensible in this vital matter: he cannot distinguish what is full of life from what is only half full or empty of it. And so his writing is less alive, and as a writer he is less alive, and in writing, as in everything else, nothing matters but life. — Ted Hughes

Psychologists should bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength - life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent RESULTS thereof. In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of SUPERFLUOUS teleological principles! - one of which is the instinct of self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). — Friedrich Nietzsche

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. — Margaret Atwood

From time to time, I meet someone who will say something like, "I am not afraid of dying." I don't buy it. Everyone is afraid of dying. It's part of the instinct that helps us survive as a species. It's a crucial feature of human evolution. It's also, I strongly suspect, a crucial reason why so many people have trouble believing evolution is true. Life can be ironic like that. — Bill Nye

Darwin's great gift to science was simplifying all life to pure mathematics: your one and only goal on earth is multiplication. Everything you do, every instinct you have, is an evolutionary urge to make babies and leave behind as many copies of yourself as possible. From that perspective, heroism makes no sense. Why risk the grave for someone else if there's no guarantee of a biological payoff? Dying for your own kids: smart. Dying for a rival's? Genetic suicide. — Christopher McDougall

This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character. In the next chapter I shall discuss the complex and little known laws of variation and of correlation of growth. In the four succeeding chapters, the most apparent and gravest difficulties on the theory will be given: namely, first, the difficulties of transitions, or in understanding how a simple being or a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or elaborately constructed organ; secondly the subject of Instinct, or the mental powers of animals, thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the Geological Record. In — Charles Darwin

Why is it that fathers so often ensure the outcome they are trying to avoid? Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? Did Thomas know, Amina wondered as she watched him, that he had just done the human equivalent of a lion sinking his teeth into his own cub? — Mira Jacob

When instinct speaks, listen to it. It might be the next push you need to reach greater heights. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

O Lord point the right path for me to walk on it. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Humanity as such, we might say, is a large collective drifting into the future with survival as its shared interest. This law differs from the "laws" that we have written down, and that have such an inorganic connotation. This law exists hardly to reign in outpourings of human instinct, but rather, is aligned with the incohate impulses toward life esconced in our hearts; it is an unspoken agreement among human beings where there are more than one. In short, this naked law, fundamental to survival,was altered and institutionalized over many thousands of years of history before our laws came to be. — Koji Suzuki

The truth is he spends thirty minutes of every hour suspecting he has missed some essential clue about himself. And not only himself
he has a recurring fantasy that one night, while he was asleep, the entire world was transformed into an alien planet, but no one bothered to tell him, and he didn't have the instinct to figure it out, and here he is now on a wild new Earth, walking around like an imbecile, as if everything he knows hasn't fallen away behind him like a river plummeting over a precipice. — Kevin Brockmeier

to have to combat one's instincts - that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When Mother had told me that animals found quiet, unexposed places to die, I had always imagined they knew they were dying, and accepted it, almost gracefully. Now I saw that this wasn't so at all: they crept into corners in the hope of surviving, they only knew they were weakened and exposed, easy prey, and their instinct was to find a hidden place and try to outlive whatever it was they were suffering. It had been a mistake to imagine they wanted to be alone, to die in peace. Animals have no knowledge of death; for them, death is the unexpected end of life, something they resist by instinct, for no good reason. In that sense, their existence has an almost mechanical quality. — John Burnside

What do people do with their lives? I mean seriously, literally, hour for hour, what does everyone do? When I was at school I felt perfectly ordinary, just like anyone else, but now it is as if I have forgotten how. I have to do impersonations of a real human being to fit in anywhere or even get served in the supermarket. I have lost my instinct and taste for life, and my days feel like eating with a cold now, knowing you need soup, swallowing, not being able to taste it. — Barney Norris

For many years eagerly thought by your enemy to destroying your life, it's all one second of mastery for you to save your life from his deadly plans, for you to survive. — Auliq Ice

The anchor of my life is the grace of God. — Lailah Gifty Akita

As we grow spiritually, God begins to wean us from things that we think we can't live without: things, comfort, the longing for life to 'work.' That's a childish instinct, to say, 'Life has to work the way I want it to work, and now'. — Nancy Leigh DeMoss

The life of God within you will make your actions instinct with holiness, and its end shall be everlasting life. Your faith in Christ clearly evinces you to be a new creature, for it kills your old confidences and makes you build upon a new foundation: your love for Christ also shows your newness, for it has killed your old desires, and captured your heart only for Jesus: and your hope, which is also a gift from the blessed Spirit, is set upon new things altogether, while your old hopes are things of which you are now ashamed. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

It dawned on him that he had never loved a woman wholeheartedly and that he had always been the loved one. This must have been the reason why he knew so little about love and women. In other words, emotionally he hadn't grown up. His instinct and ability to love passionately had withered away before they had had an opportunity to blossom. If only he had fallen in love soulfully just once in his life, even though it might have broken his heart, paralyzed his mind, made him live in a daze, bathed his face in tears, and frowned him in despair! — Ha Jin

For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for. — Doris Lessing

Religion (ought to be if it isn't) a great deal more than mere gratification of the instinct for worship linked with the straight-teaching of irreproachable credos. Religion must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development
begun now and ending never. — Anna Julia Cooper

They were all intensely excited, and all overflowing with noisy expressions of their loyalty to the Law. Yet I felt an absolute assurance in my own mind that the Hyena-Swine was implicated in the rabbit-killing. A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, save for the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form. — H.G.Wells

The Great stories give us the hope and the courage to survive life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The nobility of Teresa Leo's poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark-rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don't win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling. — Tony Hoagland

What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive? — Amy Reed

One of the things that cause stress and strain in human social life is that it is possible, up to a point, to become aware of rational grounds for a behaviour not prompted by natural instinct. But when such behaviour strains natural instinct too severely nature takes her revenge by producing either listlessness or destructiveness, either of which may cause a structure imposed by reason to break down. — Bertrand Russell

Her. My mate. She's near . . . . She was downwind but close enough that he detected her. He didn't know what she looked like, what her name was, or even her species. Yet he'd been waiting a millennium - his entire existence - for her. His head swung around in the direction of the scent. A small female stood alone off to the side of the field. At his first sight of her, his breath was lost, his Lykae Instinct roaring to life within him. - Yours. Take her. - — Kresley Cole

Much of her life had been lived like a balancing act on a spearpoint fence, and on a particularly difficult night when she was twelve, she had decided that instinct was, in fact, the quiet voice of God. Prayers did receive replies, but you had to listen closely and believe in the answer. At twelve, she wrote in her diary: God doesn't shout; He whispers, and in the whisper is the way. — Dean Koontz

That's what you might call the normal pattern of female life. I've seen many girls and women, with strong maternal instincts, keen on getting married but mainly, though they mayn't quite know it themselves - because of their urge to motherhood. And the babies come; they're happy and satisfied. Life goes back into proportion for them. They can take an interest in their husbands and in the local affairs and in the gossip that's going round, and of course in their children. But it's all in proportion. The maternal instinct, in a purely physical sense, is satisfied, you see. — Agatha Christie

I've learned so much from being a mom about the kind of person I want to be, the kind of woman I want to be. Motherhood has taught me mindfulness. If you just parent on instinct, you'll screw your kid up for life. You have to be so mindful. — Gwyneth Paltrow

Never make a calculation until you know the answer. Make an estimate before every calculation, try a simple physical argument (symmetry! invariance! conservation!) before every derivation, guess the answer to every paradox and puzzle. Courage: No one else needs to know what the guess is. Therefore make it quickly, by instinct. A right guess reinforces this instinct. A wrong guess brings the refreshment of surprise. In either case life as a spacetime expert, however long, is more fun! — John Archibald Wheeler

Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life. — Jonathan Haidt

So it is with my life, a multilayered and ever-changing fresco that only I can decipher, whose secret is mine alone. The mind selects, enhances, and betrays; happenings fade from memory; people forget one another and, in the end, all that remains is the journey of the soul, those rare moments of spiritual revelation. What actually happened isn't what matters, only the resulting scars and distinguishing marks. My past has little meaning; I can see no order to it, no clarity, purpose, or path, only a blind journey guided by instinct and detours caused by events beyond my control. There was no deliberation on my part, only good intentions and the faint sense of a greater design determining my steps. — Isabel Allende

Fear is a basic human instinct and an indicator of the gravity of a situation. It becomes an asset if it is effectively controlled. It becomes a weakness for a man if he lets it prevail over him. — Janvier Chouteu-Chando

I think life is instinct, and I just really go by that. That's one of the things I've learned - to always trust my instinct and it's always served me well. — Lori Goldstein

Because one has the animal instinct to seek out the people that suits one - you see people that go on life's journeys and get muddled along the way. If you look at their lives they've always gone with the wrong people ... can you say it's the wrong people - I don't know ... — Charlotte Rampling

I was the youngest in my family, and the only daughter, they were highly protective. But instead of restricting me, that protective instinct drove my parents to make sure I was capable and prepared for whatever life may throw at me.
Opportunities, my father would say, have to be seized with both hands, because you never know if they'll come again. — Emma Chase

Wherever I am, I see the yoke on women in some form or another. On some it sits easy for they are but beasts of burden. On others pride hushes them to silence; no complaint is made for they scorn pity or sympathy. On some it galls and chafes; they feel assured by every instinct of their nature that they were designed for a higher, nobler calling than to 'drag life's lengthening chain along. — Abby May Alcott

[Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another. — Rose Macaulay

Religion, philosophy, art - those three pillars on which the world has rested - were invented by man in order symbolically to encapsulate the idea of infinity, setting against it a symbol of its possible attainment (which in real terms is of-course impossible). Humanity has found nothing else on such an enormous scale. Admittedly man found it by instinct, without understanding why he needed God (easier that way!) or philosophy (explains everything, even the meaning of life!) or art (immortality). — Andrei Tarkovsky

The ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing! — Robert Browning

Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted. — Paul Pearsall

Because you have no survival instinct, Grace. You're like a tank, you just chug along< thinking nothing can stop you, until you meet up with a bigger tank. Are you sure you want to go out with someone with that kind of history?" mom seemed to warm her theory. " he couldhave a psychotic break. I read that people get those when they're twenty-eight. he could be almost normal and then suddenly go slasher. I mean, you know I've never told you what to do with your life before now. But what if-I told you not to see him?"
I hadn't been expecting that. My voice was brittle. "I would say that by virtue of your not acting parental up to this point, you've relinquished your abiblity to wield any power now. Sam and I are together. It's not an option."
Mom threw her hands up as if trying to stop the Grace-tank from running over her. "Okay. Fine. Just be careful, okay? Whatever. I'm going to get a drink."
And just like that her parental engergies were expendede. — Maggie Stiefvater

Above all things, the plainsmen had to have in instinct for direction. I never had a compass in my life, but I was never lost. — Charles Goodnight

Paracelsus At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages' way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance Ages ago; and in that act a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out - not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems The goal in sight again. — Robert Browning

The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. — Sigmund Freud

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family. — Bill Bryson

And who, pray, is to choose the master?" "Nobody. He's the ineluctable product of circumstances." "That's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?" "He rises to the top because he has the instinct to lead. He has the will to power. He has audacity and enthusiasm, ability, industry and energy. He fears nothing because to him danger is the salt of life." "No one could say that you hadn't a good conceit of yourself, Simon," smiled Charley. — W. Somerset Maugham

Your intuition won't fail you, the quest dear; is to silence your mind so you can feel your way home. — Nikki Rowe

The real danger is found in Humanity's refusal to move beyond the trap of instinct and into the intellectual mind. The refusal to accept our health and the health of every other living thing on this planet must always come before profit. Whether it's the oil companies, pharmaceutical companies; or anyone else; we are not Gods no matter how much the New Agers like to proclaim it. In that path lies the rubble of the enemy of life, his Fallen God Bombers and his murderous dark medics. Out of that emanates the force of fear; fear of judgement, fear of difference and fear the other will bring you pain. — Cole J. Davis

Food and sex have been bound together for a long time. I guess this is due to the intimate connection between the two most powerful instincts that predominate in life: the instinct to survive and the instinct to multiply. Nourishment and sex give us a great sense of pleasure. Having the wisdom to satisfy both desires - for food and sex - is the art of living well. I truly believe that this wisdom lies within us all. — Ori Hofmekler

Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can't always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours. — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand. — Thomas Merton

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. — H.L. Mencken

But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then. — William Ralph Inge

I'd rather be encouraged by an ant to live than taught to doubt by fifty skeptics. — Marty Rubin

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. — Keith Farnish

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world. — Helen Keller

Nothing is so deceptive as human reasoning, - nothing so slippery and reversible as what we have decided to call 'logic.' The truest compass of life is spiritual instinct. — Marie Corelli

The most savage and voracious animal never kills to increase his wealth, or open a way to grandeur. It slays to satisfy his hunger, or in a natural defense of his own life, or of those whom he is prompted by instinct to preserve. — Mary Collyer

To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst. A strength that would die fighting, kicking, screaming, that wouldn't stop until the last breath had been wrung from its body. The will to take one's place in the world. To say 'I am here.' To say 'I am. — O.R. Melling

The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven. — Montesquieu

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came. — Peter Matthiessen

I found I was able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear. It's strange how many people suffer from it. I don't mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and, what's worse, fear of life. Often they're people who seem in the best of health, prosperous, without any worry, and yet they're tortured by it. I've sometimes thought it was the most besetting humour of men, and I asked myself at one time if it was due to some deep animal instinct that man has inherited from that primeval something that first felt the thrill of life. — W. Somerset Maugham

[On married love]
This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. It is not, then, merely a question of natural instinct or emotional drive. It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment.
It is a love which is total - that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner's own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself. — Pope Paul VI

The beauty of existence is my joy. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I wanted to touch the edges of my life - the same instinct, I think, that inspires young mortals to flip tractors and enlist in foreign wars. — Karen Russell

This was not some pretty little girl, coyly flirtatious, delicately stimulated. This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong demanding that all the life within her be matched. Her instinct would detect any hedging, any dishonesty, any less than complete response to her - and then she would be gone for good. — John D. MacDonald

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something - anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . .

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people's business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your "self" into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. . . — Emil M. Cioran

What a wonderful work Wagner has done for humanity in translating the toil of life into the readable script of music! For those who seek the tale of other worlds his magic is silent; but earth-travail under his wand becomes instinct with rhythmic song to an accompaniment of the elements, and the blare and crash of the bottomless pit itself. — Richard Wagner

The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens-and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. — Arthur Miller

Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It's the irony of woman's life in that she tends to turn her assets to her own detriment in that while her psyche seeks to see her man strong; her instinct tries to weaken him. — BS Murthy

Hope is the anchor of life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

I feel jerked around. I feel sympathetic. I feel abused. It's almost harder to see Nathaniel on the good days than the bad, because you let yourself be deceived into thinking he's going to stay that way ... And I can't just walk away. Part of it is the desire to follow through on something that's become more important and meaningful in my life, and to satisfy the human instinct to help someone less fortunate. And maybe there's something more. — Steve Lopez

All through her life she was guided, not by argument or debate, but by instinct and intuition. It was a river which took her on a journey into the worlds of astrologers, psychics, soothsayers and therapists. Here lies the key that unlocks the doors between her personality and her universal appeal. This is why if Diana had lived for ever, the media would never have understood or appreciated her. For she was not of their world nor did she share their values. When she looked at a rose she savoured its beauty, they counted the petals. — Andrew Morton

Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth. — Clarence Darrow

The thing most feared in secret always happens ... All it needs is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It needs humility not pride. I am sickened by all this. Not words. Action. I shall write no more. — Cesare Pavese

Love is the instinct for creation. If there is no love, there is no humanity. — Debasish Mridha

I've never lived my life by the expectations society puts on you. When something doesn't feel right or isn't going the way it should, I listen to my instincts and change it. — Fatima Robinson

Be patient and endure the times.
Your glorious days shall come to pass. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You go into this survival instinct mode, when you feel like your life is in jeopardy. I found myself in the bathroom with my taser, which I have 10 of, my panic button and my cell phone. It was the most terrifying experience I've ever had in my life — Emma Roberts

The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was taken for granted - which is hardly imaginable now - and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as a weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force. — Stefan Zweig