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Instincts Quotes and Quotations
 Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.  I feel there are two people inside of me-me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely. I give myself, sometimes, admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it. Some of the finest moral intuitions come to quite humble people. The visiting of lofty ideas doesn't depend on formal schooling. Think of those Galilean peasants. I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right." Conviction without experiences makes for harshness. Without fanaticism we cannot accomplish anything. To have character is to be big enough to take life on. The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe. All I can do is act according to my deepest instinct, and be whatever I must be-crazy or ribald or sad or compassionate or loving or indifferent. That is all anybody can do. Instinct is untaught ability. Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster. Trust your gut. It is our business to go as we are impelled. Intuition ... appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality. Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not improve. - Holmes I go by instinct. ... I don't worry about experience. Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful. Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness. Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit, it is worse than a chance lost; it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. It is only by following your deepest instinct that you can lead a rich life. Instinct is the nose of the mind. One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses. A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them, for they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. If you let your fear of consequence prevent you from following your deepest instinct, your life will be safe, expedient and thin. Everyone was searching for a formula for survival... and the only formula that worked was no formula. Instinct ... that's all you had to go on. I feel there are two people inside me-me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely. To be faithful to your instincts and the impulses that carry you in the direction of the excellence you most desire and value ... surely that is to lead the noble life. We each need to let our intuition guide us, and then be willing to follow that guidance directly and fearlessly. By learning to contact, listen to, and act on our intuition, we can directly connect to the higher power of the universe and allow it to become our guiding force. The struggle to learn to listen to and respect our own intuitive, inner promptings is the greatest challenge of all. Once you get rid of the idea that you must please other people before you please yourself, and you begin to follow your own instincts-only then can you be successful. You become more satisfied, and when you are, other people tend to be satisfied by what you do. If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it. Spend time every day listening to what your muse is trying to tell you. When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity ... I can be sure that I am right. Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour germinates no more. Spontaneity is the quality of being able to do something just because you feel like it at the moment, of trusting your instincts, of taking yourself by surprise and snatching from the clutches of your well-organized routine a bit of unscheduled pleasure. I never believe facts; Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures. Trust your hunches. ... Hunches are usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Warning! Do not confuse your hunches with wishful thinking. This is the road to disaster. Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses. Statistics are no substitute for judgement. You cannot know what you cannot feel. We should chiefly depend not upon that department of the soul which is most superficial and fallible (our reason), but upon that department that is deep and sure, which is instinct. I make all my decisions on intuition. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect. Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness. Every advance in social progress removes us more and more from the guidance of instinct, obliging us to depend upon reason for the assurance that our habits are really agreeable to the laws of health. Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself. Impulse without reason is not enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift. The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion-these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work. A trembling in the bones may carry a more convincing testimony than the dry, documented deductions of the brain. Calculation never made a hero. We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us. All our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling. Reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do. Systems die; instincts remain. I do not believe that the deeper problems of living can ever be answered by the process of thought. I believe that life itself teaches us either patience with regard to them, or reveals to us possible solutions when our hearts are pressed close against duties and sorrows and experiences of all kinds. Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them. Nothing reaches the intellect before making its appearance in the senses. Instinct guides the animal better than the man. In the animal it is pure, in man it is led astray by his reason and intelligence. Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun. Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway. Good instincts usually tell you what to do long before your head has figured it out. Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. When a man begins to reason, he ceases to feel. A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. The mind can assert anything, and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept. People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Some other faculty than the intellect is necessary for the apprehension of reality. Command by instinct is swifter, subtler, deeper, more accurate, more in touch with reality than command by conscious mind. The discovery takes one's breath away. No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection. Nothing is impossible when we follow our inner guidance, even when its direction may threaten us by reversing our usual logic. A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast. It is wisdom to believe the heart. I follow my heart, for I can trust it. The intellect is always fooled by the heart. There are no rules. Just follow your heart. Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart. It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. Great thoughts always come from the heart. It is the heart which experiences God, not the reason. The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand. In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts, which He also gave us. Just be what you are and speak from your guts and heart-it's all a man has. When love is not madness, it is not love. To live is like to love: all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct is for it. The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful, he must obey his impulse. What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you. Falling in love is one of the activities forbidden that tiresome person, the consistently reasonable man. If you really want something you can figure out how to make it happen. - Cher Our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires. The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion. Passion and prejudice govern the world, only under the name of reason. The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones. Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibers, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself, and passion has its dreams. We do not wish ardently for what we desire only through reason. Trust your hunches. They're usually based on facts filed away just below the conscious level. Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic energy striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time. Intuition is given only to him who has undergone long preparation to receive it. You must train your intuition-you must trust the small voice inside you which tells you exactly what to say, what to decide. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something. I move on feeling and have learned to distrust those who don't. Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. Instinct is a powerful form of natural energy, perhaps comparable in humans to electricity or even atomic energy in the mechanical world. Cherish your emotions and never undervalue them. But are not this struggle and even the mistakes one may make better, and do they not develop us more, than if we kept systematically away from emotions? Many a man gets weary of clamping down on his rough impulses, which if given occasional release would encourage the living of life with salt in it, in place of dust. We shall keep our horizon perfectly, absolutely, crystallinely open, ready every day for the scouring gales of impulse. Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way. Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right. None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct. I write out of instinct. 
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