instinct

Books of poetry by young writersareusually promissory notes that are never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such a book Mr Yeats's Wanderings of Oisin certainly is. Here we find nobility of treatment and nobility of subject- matter, delicacy of poetic instinct and richness of imaginative resource.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

—Saki pseudonym of  Hector Hugh Munro

The fact of affluence is indisputable† Nevertheless, not manyof us feel that well off.The instinct forcontentment seemstohave withered even as oureconomic condition has radically improved.

—Krasna, Norman

Mastery in poetry consists largely in the instinct for not ruining or smothering or tinkering with moments of vision.

—Blunden, Edmund Charles

   The instinct of mankind warns it against accepting at their face value spiritual demands that cannot satisfy themselves by practical achievements. The road along which the organized workers, like any other class, must climb to power starts from the provision of a more effective economic service than their masters, as their grip upon industry becomes increasingly vacillating and uncertain, are able to supply.

—Tawney, R(ichard) H(enry)

The identifying ourselves with the visual image of ourselves has become an instinct; the habit is already old. The picture of me, the me that is seen, is me.

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

—Butler, Samuel

Shakespeare onegets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere, one is intimate with him by instinct.

—Austen,Jane

L'amour a son instinct, il sait trouver le chemin du coeur comme le plus faible insecte marche a'   sa fleur avec une irre¤  sistible volonte¤   qui ne s'e¤  pouvante de rien. Love has its own instinct. It knows how to find the road to the heart just as the weakest insect moves towarditsflowerbyanirresistiblewillwhichfearsnothing.

—Balzac, Honore¤   de

If you believe in the maternal instinct and fail at mother love, you fail as a woman. It is a controlling idea that holds us in an iron grip.

—Friday, Nancy

There was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe.

—Hardy,Thomas

For she was suffering that misery peculiar to the young, that they are going to be cheated by circumstances out of the full life every nerve and instinct is clamouring for.

—Lessing, Doris May ne¤  e Tayler

In a civil war, a general must knowöand I'm afraid it's a thing rather of instinct than of practiceöhe must know exactly when to move over to the other side.

—Reed, Henry

Every occupation, unless it employs the whole mind and satisfies the human creative instinct, is to some extent absurd; and abouttheadvertising business what I chiefly disliked was not so much the work I did as its general atmosphere of unreality.We dealt in fairy-goldöin fugitive dreams and illusions.

—Quennell, Sir Peter Courtney

I gave up screwing around a long time ago. I came to the conclusion that sex is a sublimation of the work instinct.

—Lodge, David John

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.When we love a womanwe don't start measuring her limbs.

—Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

—Bradley, Francis Herbert

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

—Alcott, Louisa May