An instinct is a blind ...

An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.
An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.
 Richard Whately

More phrases

Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.
Never complain and never explain.
A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
 George S. Patton
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.
 Robert Schuller
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
 Harriet Beecher Stowe

Quotes from the same author

It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
 Richard Whately
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
 Richard Whately
To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.
 Richard Whately
Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.
 Richard Whately
It is a good plan, with a young person of a character to be much affected by ludicrous and absurd representations, to show him plainly by examples that there is nothing which may not be thus represented. He will hardly need to be told that everything is not a mere joke.
 Richard Whately