Antonio Damasio Quotes

I approach my character with the question: What would an animal think? How would an animal respond? A lot of times, it's quick action and no fear, and sometimes it's irrational fear. You don't always know.

Fear, love, and hunger were the agents that developed the wits of the lower animals, as they were, of course, the prime factors in developing the intelligence of man.

Horses do sense things way before people.

This is what being alive feels like, you know? The place doesn't matter. You just live.

A living being seeks, above all, to discharge its strength. Life is will to power.

Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.

She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.

Take care of your life force and always keep it streaming. Always be active and creative, and never ever stop dreaming.

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.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

You will be tempted by the need to feed yourself.

She asked me what made me do such a thing. That is an awkward question because I often can't tell what makes me do things. Sometimes I do them just to find out what I feel like doing them. And sometimes I do them because I want to have some exciting things to tell my grandchildren.

It is my experience that in some areas [my poodle] Charley is more intelligent that I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he is now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing on an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

I look like this because I'm alive," Reagan said. "Because I've had experiences. Do you understand?

I live, which is the main point.

Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and... reproduction.

The lion cares less about being king of the beasts than about finding his dinner.

Hunger never saw bad bread.

Do you qualify to be alive or is the limit of your senses so as to survive?

... a starving man doesn't ask what the meal is.

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.

A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.