Instinctual Responses Quotes

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning-the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes-the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.

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

Fear or stupidity has always been the basis of most human actions.

As a result of a general defect of nature, we are either more confident or more fearful of unusual and unknown things.

But suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?

When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.

Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals.

When did reason ever direct our desires or our fears?

I have found that by looking at what is rewarded and punished, and why, universally - i.e., in nature as well as in humanity - I have been able to learn more about what is "good" and "bad" than by listening to most people's views about good and bad.

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

The activity of the immature human being is simply played upon to secure habits which are useful. He is trained like an animal rather than educated like a human being. His instincts remain attached to their original objects of pain or pleasure. But to get happiness or to avoid the pain of failure he has to act in a way agreeable to others.

Comedy is there to basically show us we fart, we laugh, to make us realize we still are part animal.

The animal man lives in the senses. If he does not get enough to eat, he is miserable; or if something happens to his body, he is miserable. In the senses both his misery and his happiness begin and end.

For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.

It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.

We are in a far better position to observe instincts in animals or in primitives than in ourselves. This is due to the fact that we have grown accustomed to scrutinizing our own actions and to seeking rational explanations for them.

The passions are the voice of the body.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning.

The neuro-physiological organization which we call instinct functions in a blindly mechanical way, particularly apparent when its function goes wrong.

From the moment of birth we are immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.

We have very primitive emotions,” he said . “It's impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.