These reflex quotes will inspire you. A reflex action is something that you do automatically and without thinking, as a habit or as a reaction to something.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging reflex quotes, reflex sayings, and reflex proverbs.
Best Reflex Quotes
- “It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people then to dominate them, more ‘manhood’ to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.” ~ Alex Karras
- “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” ~ Victor Hugo
- “And luckily, therefore the good old days return. The traditional art of driving counts again, and it is all about good tactics, skills and reflexes instead of simple power.” ~ Jacky Ickx
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“Love is a conflict between reflexes and reflections.” ~ Magnus Hirschfeld
- “Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale
- “Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Acting is a reflex, a mechanism for development and survival. . . . It isn’t ‘second nature,’ it is ‘first nature.'” ~ Declan Donnellan
- “Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.” ~ G. Stanley Hall
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“I just put the reflexes in the proper direction.” ~ Angelo Dundee
- “Mind is the antithesis of reflex, and only mind could discover mind” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
- “You can map out a light plan or a life plan, but when the action starts, it may not go the way you planned, and you’re down to the reflexes you developed in training. That’s where roadwork shows – the training you did in the dark of the mornin’ will show when you’re under the bright lights.” ~ Joe Frazier
- “The golden rule is work fast. As for framing, composition, focus-this is no time to start asking yourself questions: you just have to trust your intuition and the sharpness of your reflexes.” ~ Jacques-Henri Lartigue
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“Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “The worst enemy of the strategist is the clock. Time trouble… Reduces us all to pure reflex and reaction, tactical play. Emotion and instinct cloud our strategic vision when there is no time for proper evaluation.” ~ Garry Kasparov
- “Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. The photographers eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it.” ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson
- “It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.” ~ Antonin Artaud
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“Our giving is but a reflex of God’s giving.” ~ Sam Storms
- “The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.” ~ Emile M. Cioran
- “All it takes is one drink to mess with the way you drive – it clouds your judgment and slows your reflexes. Don’t take any chances. It just isn’t worth it.” ~ Paris Hilton
- “The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.” ~ Walter Lippmann
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“I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.” ~ Woody Allen
- “What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them.” ~ Timothy Leary
- “It’s quite easy to make a load of people laugh, it’s often a reflex action, but I think to make them cry is harder without manipulating them.” ~ Ricky Gervais
- “The Alexander Technique helped a long-standing back problem and to get a good night’s sleep after many years of tossing and turning.” ~ Paul Newman
- “It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles… It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.” ~ Marge Piercy
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“Here is the basic question: Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes?” ~ Robert Breault
- “Men have slow reflexes. In general it takes several generations later for them to understand.” ~ Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
- “Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle.” ~ James Surowiecki
- “I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflex. I wasn’t trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn’t Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn’t shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.” ~ Stephenie Meyer
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“It’s kind of a reflex for me to ignore my own wishes and think about other people first.” ~ Etgar Keret
- “Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.” ~ Guy Davenport
- “Easy? You men have no idea what we’re dealing with down there. Teeth placement, and jaw stress, and suction, and gag reflex, and all the while bobbing up and down, moaning and trying to breathe through our noses. Easy?Honey, they don’t call it a job for nothin’!” ~ Kim Cattrall
- “When it comes to reflexes, I’m like a cat. I’m Catwoman. I’m invulnerable. The only reason he got a piece of me is because of the rain. Cats don’t like water. It impairs us. It’s our kryptonite.” ~ Becca Fitzpatrick
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“First your legs go. Then you lose your reflexes. Then you lose your friends” ~ Willie Pep
- “Being in a multicultural environment in childhood is going to give you intuition, reflexes and instincts. You may acquire basic responsiveness later on, but it’s never going to be as spontaneous as when you have been bathing in this environment during childhood.” ~ Carlos Ghosn
- “From the viewpoint of political power, culture is absolutely vital. So vital, indeed, that power cannot operate without it. It is culture, in the sense of the everyday habits and beliefs of a people, which beds power down, makes it appear natural and inevitable, turns it into spontaneous reflex and response.” ~ Terry Eagleton
- “The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.” ~ Steven Pinker
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“How fast a company can respond in an emergency is a measure of its corporate reflexes.” ~ Bill Gates
- “That man was beautiful. Timing, speed, reflexes, rhythm, his body, everything was beautiful. And to me, still, I would say pound for pound… I’d say I’m the greatest heavyweight of all time, but pound for pound, I still say Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest of all time.” ~ Muhammad Ali
- “We have got to do a better job recognizing and correcting the errors in the system that do reflect an institutional bias in criminal justice, but what Donald Trump and I are saying is let’s not have the reflex of assuming the worst of men and women in law enforcement.” ~ Mike Pence
- “Baseball is a spirited race of man against man, reflex against reflex. A game of inches. Every skill is measured. Every heroic, every failing is seen and cheered, or booed. And then becomes a statistic.” ~ Ernie Harwell
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“There is no excuse for bad manners, except fast reflexes.” ~ Steven Brust
- “I’ve always considered myself a failure: I feel I’ve never done anything wholly right. […] Everybody will tell you, “Oh no, how can you say that, because ten thousand people clap you on a night?” But part of that is reflex action and part of it is because you’re reasonably good. But if you’re great, that’s a different thing.” ~ Ronnie Drew
- “Behaviorism proposes to study human behavior according to the methods developed by animal and infant psychology. It seeks to investigate reflexes and instincts, automatisms and unconscious reactions. But it has told us nothing about the reflexes that have built cathedrals, railroads, and fortresses, the instincts that have produced philosophies, poems, and legal systems, the automatisms that have resulted in the growth and decline of empires, the unconscious reactions that are splitting atoms.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
- “How old are you? If your first reflex is to reply with your chronological age, the number on your birth certificate, you are only one-third correct. There are actually two additional, and more important, indicators of age. And the exciting news is that it is within your power to adjust both of these other “age indicators” and truly grow younger and live longer.” ~ Deepak Chopra
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“We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.” ~ Chris Mooney
- “The soul of the truly benevolent man does not seem to reside much in his own body. Its life, to a great extent, is a mere reflex of the lives of others. It migrates into their bodies, and identifying its existence with their existence, finds its own happiness in increasing and prolonging their pleasures, in extinguishing or solacing their pains.” ~ Horace Mann
- “Because we lack sharp claws, aren’t very fast on our feet, and aren’t exactly endowed with lightning reflexes, it would be very difficult if not impossible for us to run down an animal, catch it with our bare hands, and tear through its fur and skin in order to eat it. Biologically, we are designed to be frugivorous herbivores eating mainly fruits, seeds, roots, and leaves.” ~ Sharon Gannon
- “The everyday brain could be dubbed “the baseline brain,” because it operates at the minimum functioning to keep you alive and healthy. It controls your heart rate, your blood pressure, your immune function, all of your subconscious impulses. That’s not a minor role; the baseline brain is a marvel of complexity and efficiency. But too much of it is devoted to habits, old conditioning, unconscious reflexes, and lack of self-awareness.” ~ Deepak Chopra
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“Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: ‘To take is more blessed than to give’; ‘buy cheap and sell dear’; ‘one soiled hand washes the other.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “The male is just a bundle of conditioned reflexes, is incapable of a mentally free response, is tied to his early conditioning, is determined completely by his past experiences. His earliest experiences are with his mother, and he is throughout his life tied to her. It never becomes completely clear to the male that he is not part of his mother, that he is him and she is her.” ~ Valerie Solanas
- “The State has no more existence than gods and devils have. They are equally the reflex and creation of man, for man, the individual, is the only reality. The State is but the shadow of man, the shadow of his opaqueness, of his ignorance and fear.” ~ Emma Goldman
- “It seems to me that you are solving a problem which goes beyond the limits of physiology in too simple a way. Physiology has realized its problem with fortitude, breaking man down into endless actions and counteractions and reducing him to a crossing, a vortex of reflex acts. Let it now permit sociology to restore him as a whole. Sociology will wrest man from the anatomical theatre and return him to history.” ~ Alexander Herzen
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“It’s so clear cut with a comedian – you have that reflex action, whereby you laugh or you don’t. And so you either love us or you simply cannot see why people are laughing.” ~ Jimmy Carr
- “Edward Snowden’s real “crime” is that he demonstrated how knowledge can be used to empower people, to get them to think as critically engaged citizens rather than assume that knowledge and education are merely about the learning of skills – a reductive concept that substitutes training for education and reinforces the flight from reason and the goose-stepping reflexes of an authoritarian mindset.” ~ Henry Giroux
- “Recording sessions were stimulating to photograph, because everything was in motion: the subject, the musicians, the technicians and the photographer. You needed fast reflexes to keep up with moving targets, and sensitivity and skill to get the pictures while keeping out of the performers’ eyeline so as not to break their concentration.” ~ Eve Arnold
- “The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating.” ~ Theodor Adorno
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“Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body’s reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you.” ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley
- “Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously dying for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world ‘another Calcutta.'” ~ Bharati Mukherjee
- “Those of us whose parenting style can be described as “a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments,” as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even in the face of the most red-faced outrage.” ~ Ayelet Waldman
- “[Felix Frankfurter] said courts are not representative bodies. They’re not designed to be a good reflex of a democratic society. Their judgment is best informed and, therefore, most dependable within narrow limits.” ~ Sam Brownback
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“Too often our Washington reflex is to discover a problem and then throw money at it, hoping it will somehow go away.” ~ Kenneth Keating
- “Such is the content of the mental life of the Hemingway hero and the good guy in general. Every day he gets beaten into a servile pulp by his own mechanical reflexes, which are constantly busy registering and reacting to the violent stimuli which his big, noisy, kinesthetic environment has provided for his unreflective reception.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
- “it is my belief that one should learn patience in a foreign land, for I take it that this is the true measure of travel. If one does not suffer some frustration of the ordinary reflexes, how can one be sure one is really traveling?” ~ Gertrude Diamant
- “May never glorious sun reflex his beams
Upon the country where you make abode!
But darkness and the gloomy shade of death
Environ you till mischief and despair
Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves.” ~ William Shakespeare
