Instincts

So, I work on instinct and start probing with remarks and I have an indication of what the person is like before they even open their mouth.
~ Bill Bixby, in TV Picture Life (September 1964).

Some of my instincts are reprehensible.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

There is only one way in the world to be distinguished: Follow your instinct! Be yourself, and you'll be somebody. Be one more blind follower of the blind; and you will have the oblivion you desire.
~ (William) Bliss Carman

Reasoning at every step he treads,
Man yet mistakes his way,
Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads,
Are rarely known to stray.
~ William Cowper, from Poems by William Cowper of the Inner Temple, Esq. (1782). The Doves

There is perhaps more of instinct in our feelings than we are aware of, even in our esteem of each other.
~ William Danby, Ideas and Realities, or Thoughts on Various Subjects (1827).

The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce. . . . But the main driving force in the tidying of the world's attic, the drying up of random, "innocent" sources of rarities, is information technology. We are mapping literally everything. . . .
~ William Gibson, in Wired Magazine (January 1999). My Obsession

Beasts let their instincts control them; Humans control their instincts; Man does both.
~ Billy Henson

If you float on instinct alone, how can you calculate the buoyancy for the computed load?
~ Christopher Hodder-Williams

Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such away as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance.
~ William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890). Vol. 2. Chapter 24: Instinct

The hunting and the fighting instinct continue in many manifestations. They both support the emotion of anger; they combine in the fascination which stories of atrocities have for most minds . . . the pleasure of disinterested cruelty has been thought a paradox and writers have sought to show that is no primitive attribute of our nature, but rather a resultant of the subtile or other less malignant elements of mind. This is a hopeless task.
~ William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890).

It is but seldom that a man loves one and for all; it may only show that his sexual instincts are not very strong.
~ W. Somerset Maugham

The great lie about immortality destroys every kind of reason, every kind of naturalness in the instincts.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Anti-Christians (1887).

[Jury selection] . . . is best based upon seat-of-the-pants instincts, which are undoubtedly crudely stereotypical and may in many cases be hopelessly mistaken.
~ William H. Rehnquist

Human instincts are hard-wired programming.
~ William Rotsler

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

Even in civilized mankind faint traces of monogamous instinct can be perceived.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests. Family and friends may be included but the outer world is not regarded as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin.
~ William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

It goes much against my stomach. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?
~ William Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act III, scene ii

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
~ William Stafford, Crazy Horse 7 (1971). An Interview with William Stafford

I just always think, "Do I like it?" And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
~ Billy Wilder, in Conversations With Wilder (1999).

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
~ Billy Wilder

We can try to kill all that is native, string it up by its hind legs for all to see, but spirit howls and wildness endures.
~ Terry Tempest Williams

My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
~ Ellen Willis, Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981). Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism

A few strong instincts, and a few plain rules.
~ William Wordsworth, Alas! What Boots the Long Laborious Quest?