"Instinctive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms (and all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by learning) our commerce with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or dislike. We grow as peremptory in our rejection or admission, as when a person presents himself as a candidate for our favor; our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of the contemporary regime, so knit up with all the commonest affairs of life, so powerful in its organization and broad in its operations, it has poisoned, and continues to poison, the minds of men so that the headlong process of losing all sense of comparative values is accelerated, while every instinctive effort at recovery and readjustment is nullified. How far this process has gone may be illustrated by two instances. It is only a few months ago that a most respected clergyman publicly declared that missionaries were the greatest and most efficient asset to trade because they were unofficial ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... one's own ear anew, so that it may once more hear in spirit the harmonies which were listened to by generations long since deceased, just as they sounded to the ear of the latter. There is a wonderful charm in searching after the most secret instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and which would be lost for us—since picture and word stand too far off—had they not found fixed expression in musical ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... had crept upon her a love of wine. For when (as the manner was) she, as though a sober maiden, was bidden by her parents to draw wine out of the hogshed, holding the vessel under the opening, before she poured the wine into the flagon, she sipped a little with the tip of her lips; for more her instinctive feelings refused. For this she did, not out of any desire of drink, but out of the exuberance of youth, whereby it boils over in mirthful freaks, which in youthful spirits are wont to be kept under by the gravity of their elders. And thus by ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... joyous earnest spirit pervades her work, and her sympathy is unbounded. She loves them with her whole heart, while she lays bare their little minds, and expresses their foibles, their faults, their virtues, their inward struggles, their conception of duty, and their instinctive knowledge of the right and wrong of things. She knows their characters, she understands their wants, and she desires ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
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