Thomas Keating Quotes

When we're threatened, it's very easy to appeal to our basic natures.

We are all wired into a survival trip, now.

When they face desperation... human beings become animals.

I have sympathy for any human being that's driven by their limbic part of their brain. We all know that exists in a person.

Even if they don't know it, everyone has the instinct to survive.

Fear changes everything. We're animals, and when we get afraid we act like animals. I'm not exempt from that.

Man is born to eat.

In extreme danger, fear feels no pity.

The first inclination which an animal has is to protect itself

The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.

Sometimes you have to rely on sex and bodily functions.

I have one instinct stronger than any other thing in life, and that is the instinct for survival.

Man is almost always as wicked as his needs require.

He didn't care about the others anymore. The chaos around him seemed to siphon away his humanity, turn him into an animal. All he wanted was to survive, make it to that building, get inside. Live. Gain another day.

Rabbits live close to death and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.

Man is guided by the stomach. He walks and the stomach goes first and the head afterwards. Have you not seen that? It will take ages for the head to go first.

Instinct. When the house burns one forgets even lunch. Yes, but one eats it later in the ashes.

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think... This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not.

I don’t think we’re an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.

The animal has no intellectual capacity to justify or to find reasons to exist. An animal just exists because it's the natural thing to do.

Hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.

Man is a perpetually wanting animal.