Impulse Quotes - Page 23

• You have to separate the humanitarian impulse from the record of aid itself. We all want to help. Many people would say that it's the moral impulse of the rich to help the poor, but the record of aid has been terrible.

  George Ayittey

  People, Records, Want

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• To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

  Eva Zeisel

  Mean, Creative, Negative

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• When your mind is preoccupied, your impulses—not your long-term goals—will guide your choices.

  Kelly McGonigal

  Long, Goal, Choices

  Kelly McGonigal (2011). “The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It”, p.24, Penguin

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• Perseverance is the master impulse of the firmest souls, the discipline of the noblest virtues, and the guaranty of acquisitions the most invigorating in their use and inestimable in their worth.

  Elias Lyman Magoon

  Perseverance, Discipline, Soul

  Elias Lyman Magoon (1849). “Proverbs for the people: or, Illustrations of practical godliness drawn from the Book of wisdom”, p.182

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• The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.

  Johan Huizinga

  Civilization, Play, Dancing

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• The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

  George Steiner

  Spring, Unique, Men

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• A part of sexuality may go to research, and a much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation. The art of the future will, because of the very opportunities and materials it will have at its command, need an infinitely stronger formative impulse than it does now.

  John Desmond Bernal

  Art, Opportunity, Stronger

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• It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse.

  Max Nordau

  Creative, Wells

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• Sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me.

  Arthur Rubinstein

  Men, Practice, Rooms

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• As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. 'I come to seek God because I need Him', may be an adequate formula for prayer. 'I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet', is the only possible formula for worship.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Religious, Prayer, Feet

  Evelyn Underhill (2002). “Worship”, p.9, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Traveling is more fun - hell, life is more fun - if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

  Bill Bryson

  Fun, Life Is, Hell

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• There are things in the human mind that are not meant to be seen or touched, things seldom even acknowledged by our conscious selves. Fantasies, impulses, rages, hatreds, primitive instincts. They're buried deep, usually, and that's where they belong.

  Kay Hooper

  Self, Hatred, Mind

  Kay Hooper (2010). “Stealing Shadows: A Bishop/Special Crimes Unit Novel”, p.31, Bantam

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• A man's moral worth is not measured by what his religious beliefs are but rather by what emotional impulses he has received from Nature during his lifetime.

  Albert Einstein

  Religious, Men, Emotional

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• Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something)

  Mark Twain

  Children, Fall, Cat

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.3504, Delphi Classics

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• I shall attempt to prove two things: first, that the actions and dispositions of mankind are the offspring of circumstances and events, and not of any original determination that they bring into the world; and, secondly, that the great stream of our voluntary actions essentially depends, not upon the direct and immediate impulses of sense, but upon the decisions of the understanding.

  William Godwin

  Determination, Two, Decision

  William Godwin (2015). “Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: And Its Influence On Morals And Happiness”, p.78, Penguin UK

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• I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

  Thom Gunn

  Sex, Thinking, Self

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• When calling for authenticity, we need to take seriously the brokenness and sinfulness of the human heart. If to be authentic means to be who we really are or to express what we really feel, then in most cases I’m going to vote for hypocrisy. Our prisons are filled with men and women who acted on their feelings and impulses. If authenticity is about being true to yourself, these individuals should be our models of inspiration.

  Erwin McManus

  Inspiration, Heart, Mean

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• I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Life, Night, Men

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• The ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!

  Robert Browning

  Life, Angel, Law

  Robert Browning (1994). “The Works of Robert Browning”, p.491, Wordsworth Editions

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• Habit must play a larger place in our religious life. We worship when we feel like it, we pray when we feel like it. We read the Bible when we feel like it. Leaving our religious exercises to the promptings of impulse, we become creatures of impulse rather than soldiers of Christ. An army made up of creatures of impulse would be only a mob. So is a church.

  Ralph Washington Sockman

  Life, Religious, Exercise

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• People with intelligence must use their intelligence, people with eyes must use their eyes, people with the capacity to love have the impulse to love and the need to love in order to feel healthy. Capacities clamor to be used, and cease their clamor only when they are used sufficiently. That is to say, capacities are needs, and therefore are intrinsic values as well.

  Abraham Maslow

  Eye, Order, Capacity To Love

  "Toward a Psychology of Being".

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• Desire, liberated from its ties to the ego, realizes that it has no other aspiration than the fullness of Mahamudra and, as it sees in the same impulse that this plenitude is innate and limitless, it no longer aspires to any realization whatsoever. There is no longer anything but intimate vibration, continuous sacred tremoring, and the absence of localization in time and space.

  Daniel Odier

  Space, Ties, Ego

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• A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism - the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Cooking, Example

  Michael Pollan (2009). “The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Integration proceeds by just the opposite route: a deliberate heightening of every organic function; a release of impulses from circumstances that irrationally thwarted them; richer and more complex patterns of activity; an esthetic heightening of anticipated realizations; a steady lengthening of the future; a faith in cosmic perspectives.

  Lewis Mumford

  Love, Faith, Opposites

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• Men in general are too material and do not make enough human contacts. If we search for the fundamentals which actually motivate us we will find that they come under four headings: love, money, adventure and religion. It is to some of them that we always owe that big urge which pushes us onward. Men who crush these impulses and settle down to everyday routine are bound to sink into mediocrity. No man is a complete unit of himself; he needs the contact, the stimulus and the driving power which is generated by his contact with other men, their ideas, and constantly changing scenes.

  Edward S. Jordan

  Love, Crush, Adventure

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