Animal Instinct Quotes

A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

Man is the most intelligent of the animals - and the most silly.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse's breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature's laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct.

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit's cry may be wilder But it has no soul.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs inwardly - but then perhaps, also inwardly, the crab resolves equations of the second degree.

Too much of the animal disfigures the civilized human being, too much culture makes a sick animal.

Human reason borrowed many arts from the instinct of animals.

The wolf asketh not how many the sheep may be.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

We're the only species who follow unstable leaders. This is true - it has little to do with America - around the world, pack leaders are unstable. Animals don't follow that.

A hungry dog believes in nothing but meat.

What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It's not an intellectual thing. It's almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

It's an amazing thing to watch a lizard fold a moth into its mouth, like a sword swallower who specialises in umbrellas.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

Death inspires me like a dog inspires a rabbit.

We're all animals.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

The idea of the nest in the bird's mind, where does it come from?

Reason is man's faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man's ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man's instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man's instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.

His name, Buzz, fits. He can buzz along at 40 miles an hour when his genetic memory moves him.

When a dog barks at the moon, then it is religion; but when he barks at strangers, it is patriotism!