H. L. Mencken Quotes About Impulse

• There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.

  H. L. Mencken

  Happiness, Men, Religion

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.163, Vintage

• If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse - as aman shoots himself

  H. L. Mencken

  Funny, Marriage, Suicidal

• An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Artist, Self

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.466, Vintage

• I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs. There is in every living creature an obscure but powerful impulse to active functioning. Life demands to be lived. Inaction, save as a measure of recuperation between bursts of activity, is painful and dangerous to the healthy organism- in fact, it is almost impossible. Only the dying can be really idle.

  H. L. Mencken

  Life, Success, Powerful

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