Jose Ortega y Gasset Quotes

There is still a wildness inside people that we've spent millennia trying to tame.

I think there's something we all relate to about...wanting to get to our most primal self.

Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.

We are all human, and our senses are quicker to prompt us than our reason. Every man gives off a scent, and that scent tells you how to act before your head does.

For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him

It would seem from this fact, that man is naturally a wild animal, and that when taken from the woods, he is never happy in his natural state, 'till he returns to them again.

Man must be disciplined, for he is by nature raw and wild.

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

Animals can learn, but it is not by learning that they become dogs, cats, or horses. Only man has to learn to become what he is supposed to be.

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

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.

I never act. I simply bring out the real animal that's in me.

In our dreams we are able to fly . . . and that is a remembering of how we were meant to be.

Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love-everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires'-it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

The entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement - from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inborn behavior toward acquired knowledge. A half-grown panther abandoned in the wilderness will grow up to be a perfectly normal panther. But a half-grown child similarly abandoned will grow up into an unrecognizable savage, unfit for normal society. Yet there are those who insist the opposite: that we are creatures of instinct, like wolves.

This is the tendency of all living things: to avoid pain and to cling to pleasure.

Machines have altered our way of life, but not our instincts. Consequently, there is maladjustment.

Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts.

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.

Once you wake up the human animal, you can't put it back to sleep again.

When man invented fire, he didn't say, "Hey, let's cook." He said, "Great, now we can see naked bottoms in the dark.

Human nature is largely something that has to be overcome.