Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transprose.
--
Pt. II line 440.John Dryden
“They did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (Rom. i. 28), and though they could not extinguish “the Light that lighteth every man,” and which “shone in the darkness;” yet because the darkness could not comprehend the Light, they refused to bear witness of it, and worshipped, instead, the shaping mist, which the Light had drawn upward from the ground (i.e., from the mere animal nature and instinct), and which that Light alone had made visible (i.e., by super-inducing on the animal instinct the principle of self-consciousness).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
We all have the drum major instinct. We all want to be important, to surpass others, to achieve distinction, to lead the parade. ... And the great issue of life is to harness the drum major instinct. It is a good instinct if you don't distort it and pervert it. Don't give it up. Keep feeling the need for being important. Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be the first in love. I want you to be the first in moral excellence. I want you to be the first in generosity.
Martin Luther King
Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every "impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.—To think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life! … What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for decadence, and no less for idiocy. … Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German decadence as a philosophy—that is Kant!
Immanuel Kant
Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
William Saroyan
God creates out of nothing, but here, if I dare say so, he does more-he dresses an instinct in all the beauty of erotic love so that the lovers see only the beauty and are unaware of the instinct.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Dryden, John
Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste
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