Natural Impulses Quotes

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Human Nature Baby, grab it and growl.

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

The cues that arouse desire are changed by Fashion, but feel like the proddings of Nature.

There's the caveman in us. The caveman in you says, "I want direct contact. I don't want a picture." The caveman in our body says once in a while, we have to go outside. We have to meet real people, talk to real people, and do real things.

Left to himself, man is half beast and half devil.

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.

The active part of man consists of powerful instincts, some of which are gentle and continuous; others violent and short; some baser, some nobler, and all necessary.

I think by and large, humans prefer to think of themselves as minds from the neck up. We don't really like to think of ourselves as another animal, another digesting, excreting, mating, snoring, sleeping kind of sack of guts. I don't think we like that. I think we'd rather not be reminded of it.

All of earth's creatures have, hidden within their beings, a wild uncontrollable urge to punt!

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

Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame.

We are civilized human beings, but we're all animals deep down, and that creates a certain friction in all of us.

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

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

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.

Reason is the servant of instinct.

All these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of man's actions.

Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men.

We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.

That animal part of us, it's the most interesting part. It's everything that has to do with drives, with things we can't stop ourselves from doing, with all the spaces where we're unable to reason with ourselves. It has its dark side, but there's a luminous side, too, which is the fact that we're just another species of animal.