William Hamilton Quotes

Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.

No man is the wiser for his learning; it may administer matter to work in, or objects to work upon; but wit and wisdom are born with a man.

Fundamental ideas are not a consequence of experience, but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind, which is independent of all experience in its origin, though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

It's a big jump from smart to motherwit.

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

Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.

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

Ignorance is pitiful! If you are ignorant and stupid, you are sick - white, black, green, I don't care.

He lived according to the laws of instinct and of the innocent and wise conduct that nature impressed upon him in the cradle.

The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

The child's mind is not the type of mind we adults possess. If we call our type of mind the conscious type, that of the child is an unconscious mind. Now an unconscious mind does not mean an inferior mind. An unconscious mind can be full of intelligence. One will find this type of intelligence in every being, and every insect has it.

I've always had an aptitude for wrestling. I can't explain it - it's like a gift. To this day, I don't always know how or why I do certain things.

You either have the charisma, the knowledge, the passion, the intelligence - or you don't.

People think catching a football one-handed is a technique, but it's more a reaction. Because you really don't think about it when you're doing it. You just do it. I couldn't sit there and try to teach someone how to catch a one-handed football.

I think I rely on my talent more than my brain sometimes.

When I was 16, I didn't really know what intuition was as a word, even. It's one of those things you experience, but you don't really know what it is.

Nature has given us the seeds of knowledge, not knowledge itself.

For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.

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

You'll begin to act when you can forget your technique - when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously.

Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.

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.