Compulsion Quotes - Page 6

• The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.

  Babette Deutsch

  Lovers, Poet, Certain

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• Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Attitude, Passion, Character

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• the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

  Lorrie Moore

  Reading, Writing, Order

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• The brain may die, but my compulsion for useless trivia lives on.

  Molly Harper

  Brain, Useless, May

  Molly Harper (2009). “Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs”, p.100, Simon and Schuster

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• Humorists are not humorous twenty-four hours a day. In fact, when you get to know them well, they are often not humorous at all. They tend to be hypersensitive, taut, neurotic creatures driven by God know what obscure compulsion to earn their living the hard way.

  Margaret Halsey

  Humorous, Four, Way

  Margaret Halsey (1946). “Color blind: a white woman looks at the Negro”

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• The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

  Carolyn Heilbrun

  Marriage, Husband, Lovers

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• Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Experience, Needs, Rising

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

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• The denial of an objective moral law, based on the compulsion to deny the existence of God, results ultimately in the denial of evil iteself.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Law, Evil, Denial

  Ravi Zacharias (2010). “Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend”, p.193, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Views, Patriotism, Democracy

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• Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Art, Years, Letters

  Letter declining Pulitzer Prize in fiction (1926)

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• If we can implant in our people the Christian virtues which we sum up in the word character, and, at the same time, give them a knowledge of the line which should be drawn between voluntary action and governmental compulsion in a democracy, and of what can be accomplished within the stern laws of economics, we will enable them to retain their freedom, and at the same time, make them worthy to be free.

  Winthrop W. Aldrich

  Christian, Freedom, Character

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• In fact, the libertarian would reason that the fact that human nature is a mixture of both good and evil provides its own particular argument in his favor. For if man is such a mixture, then the best societal framework is surely one in which evil is discouraged and the good encouraged. The libertarian maintains that the existence of the State apparatus provides a ready, swift channel for the exercise of evil, since the rulers of the State are thereby legitimated and can wield compulsion in ways that no one else is permitted to do.

  Murray Rothbard

  Exercise, Men, Evil

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• TO THOSE WHO WOULD USE INTELLIGENCE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DEATH - TO STRENGTHEN THE WILL TO LIVE AGAINST THE WISH TO DIE, AND TO REPLACE WITH LOVE THE BLIND COMPULSION TO GIVE HOSTAGES TO HATRED AS THE PRICE OF LIVING.

  Karl A. Menninger

  Life, Wish To Die, Giving

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• A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  Wise, Wisdom, Men

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• The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

  Eric Hoffer

  Creativity, Self, Creative

  "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'". The New York Times Magazine, p. 52, April 25, 1971.

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• When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten. When the belt fits, the belly is forgotten. When the heart is right, "for" and "against" are forgotten. No drives, no compulsions, no needs, no attractions: Then your affairs are under control. You are a free man.

  Zhuangzi

  Heart, Men, Shoes

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• Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires.

  William O. Douglas

  Thinking, Government, Organization

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• All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.

  Carl Jung

  Writing, Speaks Out, Tasks

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  Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Occupation, Jazz

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• To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Memories, Ego, Mind

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.48, New World Library

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• A shivery, delicious Southern Gothic with feuding families, dark spirits, ancient curses and caught up in the middle, a young girl learning to live and love for the first time. Atmospheric and suspenseful, Compulsion will draw you in and hold you until the very last page.

  Leah Cypess

  Girl, Dark, Southern

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• Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer.

  David Foster Wallace

  New York, Mean, Numbers

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, February 1, 1996.

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• Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority.

  James Fitzjames Stephen

  Government, Giving, Trying

  James Fitzjames Stephen (1991). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: And Three Brief Essays”, p.70, University of Chicago Press

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• We do not assert that the capitalist mode of economic calculation guarantees the absolutely best solution of the allocation of factors of production. Such absolutely perfect solutions of any problem are out of reach of mortal men. What the operation of a market not sabotaged by the interference of compulsion and coercion can bring about is merely the best solution accessible to the human mind under the given state of technological knowledge and the intellectual abilities of the age's shrewdest men.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Perfect, Mind

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• Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these things abut a person, you can touch him at the core of his being.

  William Bernbach

  Powerful, Knowledge, Men

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