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

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

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

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Eclecticism - every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

Another occupation might have been better.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

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

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

My mum says, 'Go with your first instinct,' but this can lead to impulse buying!

To be womanly is one thing, and one only; it is to be sensitive to man, to be highly endowed with the sex instinct; to be manly is to be sensitive to woman.

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

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 woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

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.

The instinct to worship is hardly less strong than the instinct to eat.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

Your instinct, rather than precision stabbing, is more about just random bludgeoning.

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.

Love between a man and a woman is founded on the mating instinct and is not free from desire and self-seeking. But to have a friend and to be true under any and all trials is the mark of a man!

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

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

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.

Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.

It's a perfectly human instinct to want to be near water.

Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Yet otters have not been hunters in water long enough for the habit to become an instinct.

Surely we have always acted; it is an instinct inherent in all of us. Some of us are better at it than others, but we all do it.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

I have long enjoyed the friendship and companionship of Republicans because I am by instinct a teacher, and I would like to teach them something.

I go by instinct - I don't worry about experience.

Reasoning at every step he treads, Man yet mistakes his way, Whilst meaner things, whom instinct leads, Are rarely known to stray.