Richard Whately Quotes

An instinct is an agent which performs blindly and ignorantly a work of intelligence and knowledge.

How do I do it? I don't know how I wouldn't do it - that's the thing.

None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

Everything good is instinct--and, as a result, easy, necessary, free.

Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.

This game, it seems when you play it the best, is when you're not really thinking a lot and just reacting and keeping it at its simplest point - just see it and hit it.

And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.

While you're doing it, you don't really know what you're doing.

We have a saying in France. A dog doesn't make a cat.

I'm not always the first person to run out and see something I'm in. I don't know; for me, that's not why I did it. I did it because I wanted to act. I don't really think about the end result. I don't feel like I have to see it - for me, it already happened.

Most of the time I'm really not aware of what I am doing. I'm just so locked into the moment.

I was the first independent to walk in with a documentary.

It's in our genes, we were built to wander.

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.

We often disguise our reflexes as deliberate actions.

Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock.

It is too bad if you have to do everything upon reflection and can't do anything from early habit.

At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.

What is a habit? It’s just a shackle for ourselves.

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

I don't act; I react.