Instinct quotes
446 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside instinct — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If you're not comfortable with a strong woman you're not comfortable with your own feminine instincts. You're not comfortable, period. You're going to be threatened by everything that's not exactly like you are ... and that is the measure any man."
"Those who have gone through the high school of reporterdom have acquired a new instinct by which they see and hear only that which can create a sensation, and accordingly their report becomes not only a careless one, but hopelessly distorted."
"What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you."
"I go by the gut. I might not appear to have any talent but I've got plenty of gut instinct."
"How we act with each other really reveals our most animal instincts."
"All money nowadays seems to be produced with a natural homing instinct for the Treasury."
"The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy."
"I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die."
"Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway"
"By dint of making sacrifices, a man grows interested in the person who exacts them. Great ladies, like courtesans, know this truth by instinct."
"I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome — and so I live. Would I had never lived!"
"A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend."
"Before you look to blame another, look within yourself, for at some point you have not listened to your own instincts."
"Physiologists should think 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."
"One puzzling thing about men -- they allow their sex instinct to drive them to where their intelligence never would take them."
"I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don't have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct."
"Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions."
"Instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct."
"Its time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap"
"I'm not a marketing person. I don't ask myself questions. I go by instinct."
