Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

Reason is the servant of instinct.

The truth is that from birth on we are, to one extent or another, a fairly sensual species.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Brutes by their natural instinct have produced many discoveries, whereas men by discussion and the conclusions of reason have given birth to few or none.

Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

Reason is the historian, but passions are the actors.

What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.

Man is a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

By his intellect, [man] is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

Intuition does not denote something contrary to reason, but something outside of the province of reason.

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals.

Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.

What is now an act of reason, was but blind impulse.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.

When a man's making love, the last thing he thinks about is war.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

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.

There is not, in my opinion, anything more mysterious in nature than this instinct in animals, which thus rise above reason, and yet fall infinitely short of it.

God had given men reason, by which they could find out things for themselves, but He had given animals knowledge which did not depend on reason, and which was much more prompt and perfect in its way, and by which they had often saved the lives of men.

Sweet instinct leaps; slow reason feebly climbs.

No music while making love... the sound of the love being made is better than music.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives.

Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.