Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

The maternal instinct is in me.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

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.

Sometimes I can spend months doing things to make sure that my instincts work correctly, but ultimately it's still instinctive.

Instinct leads, logic does but follow.

I was always meant to be a mom. As soon as I had my kids, it just felt so natural.

Babies smell amazing, but I'm not one of these women who smell a baby and go, 'I want one.' I see a dog over the field and go, 'I want one.'

I'm very impulsive and I always had a belief in instinct leading the way.

Motherhood is heroism. It is God-given, and yet men treat women as though of similar common clay, when in fact they are but lower than the angels.

Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

It's in our genes, we were built to wander.

Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.

An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.

You can't just try to be a performer. It's in your DNA. I really believe that it's either what you are or it's not at all.

This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames.

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.

I don’t know why we do it. But sometimes we just swim straight for the net.

Whether you're playing a mom on-screen or you're in a car pool lane driving your child to school in the morning, there are similarities that are undeniable. And once you're a mother, there are certain things that are instinct. You just have a better understanding of what it means to be a mother.

Motherhood is neither a duty nor a privilege, but simply the way that humanity can satisfy the desire for physical immortality and triumph over the fear of death.

At the very last moment, Nature would force you to blink your eye. Nature will protect her own.

Personally I prefer to work things out by feel, by instinct.

I rely a great deal on animal instincts.

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

Every major move in my life was done instinctively.