What's the difference between cunning and instinct?

Cunning


Definition:

  • (a.) Knowing; skillful; dexterous.
  • (a.) Wrought with, or exhibiting, skill or ingenuity; ingenious; curious; as, cunning work.
  • (a.) Crafty; sly; artful; designing; deceitful.
  • (a.) Pretty or pleasing; as, a cunning little boy.
  • (a.) Knowledge; art; skill; dexterity.
  • (a.) The faculty or act of using stratagem to accomplish a purpose; fraudulent skill or dexterity; deceit; craft.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But the Franco-British spat sparked by Dave's rejection of Angela and Nicolas's cunning plan to save the euro has been given wings by news the US credit agencies may soon strip France of its triple-A rating and is coming along very nicely, thank you. "
  • (2) According to his blog, he's been acting on the advice of a friend and pursuing a course of "silence, exile and cunning", but I'm not sure a couple of years of not giving interviews to Heat qualifies.
  • (3) "They are alert, cunning and devious individuals who have current knowledge of investigative methods and techniques which may be used against them," said an internal report.
  • (4) 3.16pm BST Myners explains that his solution is a PLC-plus board -- a highly qualified board, holding the executive to account, complemented by a national council who is charged with checking that the board is doing what it should ( acting like shareholders, effectively ) He denies that it's a cunning plan to get his friends onto the Co-op board.
  • (5) The SNP minority government at Holyrood after 2007 survived from day to day by cunning deals that played the other parties off against one another.
  • (6) In fact, not only have the teams that failed to qualify not been invited to play, for if they were that would contradict the elitist terms of the qualification that are disavowed so cunningly here by Pitbull, but also in reality, only Fifa functionaries, Brazilian bureaucrats and half the BBC will get into Brazil's stadiums gratis this summer.
  • (7) The capacity of urea-N synthesis (CUNS), the galactose elimination capacity (GEC) and the antipyrine clearance (APC) were measured in rats immediately after 30, 70 and 90% partial hepatectomy and after sham operation.
  • (8) 1980 was his best year for opera: the Cologne company (whose music director, John Pritchard, became a staunch supporter) brought Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte and Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto, Glasgow provided Berg's Wozzeck and Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, and the festival itself produced a distinguished world premiere in Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse.
  • (9) In it she explains how she scratched the graffito "My French teacher is a cun-" on a door, and was stopped just as she finished that crucial "t".)
  • (10) Putin is a cunning negotiator with the skills of a KGB colonel, varying between brute force, charm and obfuscation.
  • (11) He added that the core message from Pyongyang was that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service was using the reptiles “as part of a ‘cunning scheme’ to challenge our unity”.
  • (12) It needed stamina, ice-in-the-veins bravery, cunning, cool judgment and brute determination.
  • (13) So much so that he ends the press conference with the point, and has a little smile at his own cunning.
  • (14) Running at the visiting defence, N’Doye produced a cunning disguise pass that the Croat Jelavic took in his stride and dispatched past Brad Guzan via a looping deflection.
  • (15) Only Eurovision could offer up such a song: a plea for ethnic tolerance, cunningly disguised as an Abba track with the offcuts from a pantomime.
  • (16) Anyway, back to these fraudsters, who are the least costly element of a leaky system, but nevertheless transfix the political imagination as though they were masterminds of cunning and audacity, whose long game were to destroy the fabric of society altogether.
  • (17) Steve Hilton's cunning plan to abolish all consumer, employment and maternity rights got a dusty answer, while his green passions are at least tolerated.
  • (18) Former schemes were tiny but this one is mammoth, the debt kept cunningly off the public borrowing books (which the Office for National Statistics allowed; it's said the Treasury was amazed).
  • (19) It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's.
  • (20) Undercover underwear What do you do when you develop a cunning remote-monitoring system to track soldiers’ performance in the field, but they don’t want to wear a clumsy chest strap, or forget to wear the wristband?

Instinct


Definition:

  • (a.) Urged or stimulated from within; naturally moved or impelled; imbued; animated; alive; quick; as, birds instinct with life.
  • (a.) Natural inward impulse; unconscious, involuntary, or unreasoning prompting to any mode of action, whether bodily, or mental, without a distinct apprehension of the end or object to be accomplished.
  • (a.) Specif., the natural, unreasoning, impulse by which an animal is guided to the performance of any action, without of improvement in the method.
  • (a.) A natural aptitude or knack; a predilection; as, an instinct for order; to be modest by instinct.
  • (v. t.) To impress, as an animating power, or instinct.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) David Cameron was accused of revealing his ill-suppressed Bullingdon Club instincts when he shouted at the Labour frontbencher Angela Eagle to "calm down, dear" as she berated him for misleading MPs at prime minister's questions.
  • (2) She says he wants his actors to be in a "second state", instinctive, holding nothing back.
  • (3) Whenever Fox meets someone for the first time, he slips on this look as instinctively as others shuck on a jacket when they leave the house.
  • (4) Perhaps he is instinctively more forgiving about avoiding tax, which some right-wingers always regard as an indecent affront, than the free use of public funds.
  • (5) My every instinct is to stand with those who defend migrants and migration.
  • (6) Now, as the Guardian editorial writers have pointed out, I am indeed "instinctively liberal" .
  • (7) My sense is that a stronger mandate and more time would allow a more patient approach and a softer Brexit, probably more in line with May’s instincts.” The FTSE 100 index Deutsche Bank declared that the general election was a “game changer” for the pound, forcing it to tear up its sterling forecasts.
  • (8) "My own personal instinct – partly because I am the secretary of state responsible for universities and partly because I think the policy is right – is very much to vote for it.
  • (9) Even Battersea's tiny 503 theatre, which gets not a penny of public money, has had a surer instinct for new plays – Katori Hall's The Mountaintop won at the Olivier awards last March – than Hampstead, which currently receives £930,000 from Arts Council England alone.
  • (10) His instinct that there was something there in the association beyond simple chronology is rewarded in the details.
  • (11) Nothing,” he says, “lights up the brain like play.” We know this instinctively when it comes to bringing up children.
  • (12) Also analogues seem to be the producing of the so-called instinctives as mam(m)a and papa by somewhat older babies which are able to pass over from the babbling into permanent words of the adults' speech in which they persist if used without shifting of sounds since they are produced de novo generation by generation, but they are subordinate to shifting and possible extinction if used in the form of derivatives in the standard language, and some phenomena of the phylogenesis as the survival of less differentiated species contrary to the relatively quick extinction of the highly specialized ones.
  • (13) Most had never done any of these things before, but they needed no encouragement: the exhilaration with which they explored the living world seemed instinctive.
  • (14) Abnormalities of vegetative and instinctive regulation, psychomotor and affective disorders which are, as a rule, of the borderline nature, occupy the leading position in the structure of the above-indicated disorders.
  • (15) What they say "He has an instinctive, visceral understanding of how theatre works": Garry Hynes, artistic director of Druid Theatre Company.
  • (16) It was found that the maternity instinct is inborn but it starts to show only during the second year of life and is manifested in the form of playing with dolls and reaches its peak at the age of 3-5 years.
  • (17) New progressives are instinctively pluralist in their approach to politics.
  • (18) Pavlov did not distinguish between URs and instincts, but he preferred the former term.
  • (19) When it came to his turn to address the leader, he instinctively popped the question that many in Greece have wanted to ask.
  • (20) The Wolf of Wall Street is already the ninth-biggest 18-certificate movie at the UK box-office, behind Hannibal (£21.6m), American Beauty (£21.3m), Seven (£19.5m), Silence of the Lambs (£17.1m), Bruno (£15.8m), Django Unchained (£15.7m), Basic Instinct (£15.5m) and Fatal Attraction (£15.4m).