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Exlpore more Instinct quotes
"The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers."
"You have put yourself at risk to activate your instinctual genius."
"I had an instinct before and maybe now I don't have that instinct as much as knowing what to do, what shots to hit, where to place the ball, things like that."
"A wolf's thoughts are seldom far from its appetite."
"Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form."
"If you swim with sharks, make sure you have the appetite of a whale."
"I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went."
"In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships."
"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."
"The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent."
"We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments."
"The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer."
"I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths."
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