Pastoral Resources

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

Today I trust my instinct, I trust myself. Finally.

Freud's view is that all love is sexual in its origin or its basis. Even those loves which do not appear to be sexual or erotic have a sexual root or core. They are all sublimations of the sexual instinct.

She had a womanly instinct that clothes possess an influence more powerful over many than the worth of character or the magic of manners.

Actors are trusting souls, and we must go by gut-level instinct, even after our agents and business managers weigh all the odds.

The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.

Instinct is untaught ability.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.

Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside.

The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman.

To destroy is still the strongest instinct in nature.

Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.

It taught me that Clinton's instinct to make this about your life as a citizen, rather than his as a human being, was the right answer to these things.

All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.

Looking back, I realize that nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

At this period the enthusiasm of the amateur was fast giving way to a more steady commercial instinct, and I let no opportunity slip of improving my position, but I felt that I was still labouring under the disadvantage of not having acquired some technical profession.

Common sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.