Impulse Quotes - Page 3

• Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel.

  John Dalton

  Wise, Loyalty, Fall

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• The Bhagavad-Gita calls on humanity to dedicate body, mind and soul to pure duty and not to become mental voluptuaries at the mercy of random desires and undisciplined impulses.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Humanity, Soul, Mind

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• We are creating a political demolition derby, not a presidential debate. Those strange impulses in the American soul that have produced mud wrestling and The Gong Show seem to have claimed the national campaign.

  Hugh Sidey

  Wrestling, Creating, Presidential

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• The first obligation I have is to be funny; it's my first impulse and an instinct. I like being funny and finding the jokes.

  George Carlin

  Firsts, Instinct, Obligation

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I usually cast myself in things because acting is how I best relate to artistic impulses. It's what I've wanted to do since I was a child, so a scene usually plays itself out in my head with me performing it. And if I cast myself that's one less person I have to pay, one less person I have to explain my vision to, one less person I have to worry about.

  Amber Sealey

  Children, Play, Worry

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.

  William Deresiewicz

  Errors, Doubt, Trial And Error

  William Deresiewicz (2015). “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life”, p.151, Simon and Schuster

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• Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.

  Max Scheler

  Revenge, Attitude, Self

  Max Scheler, Harold J. Bershady (1992). “On Feeling, Knowing, and Valuing: Selected Writings”, p.117, University of Chicago Press

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• One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. . . . Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

  Annie Dillard

  Book, Writing, Play

  "The Writing Life". Book by Annie Dillard, archive.nytimes.com. 1989.

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• The joy a person is usually seen to express at the conversion of another to his opinion is seldom more than the impulse of egotistical satisfaction at being considered worthy of didactic imitation.

  Norm MacDonald

  Joy, Satisfaction, Opinion

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• How would that excellent mystery, wedded life, irradiate the world with its blessed influences, were the generous impulses and sentiments of courtship but perpetuated in all their exuberant fullness during the sequel of marriage!

  Arthur Frederick Saunders

  Blessed, World, Mystery

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• Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Loss, Giving, Culture

  Friedrich Schiller (2015). “Aesthetical Essays of Schiller: Top Classic of German”, p.34, 谷月社

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• Fate hath no voice but the heart's impulse.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Heart, Fate, Voice

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Friedrich Schiller (1847). “The Piccolomini; or, The first part of Wallenstein. Tr. from Schiller. The death of Wallenstein”, p.86

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• The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Simple, Views, World

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• One rational voice is dumb: over a grave
  The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.
  Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
  And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

  W. H. Auden

  Death, Cities, Voice

  "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" l. 109 (1939)

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• Human beings are innately loving beings. When we fail to love, it is because an element of ignorance has intruded into our experience, submerging our natural impulse to love.

  Nhat Hanh

  Love, Ignorance, Experience

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• One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.

  V. S. Pritchett

  Self, Creative, Emotion

  "The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers" by Random House, (p. 28), 1980.

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• Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.

  Carolyn Heilbrun

  Kindness, Selfish, Years

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• If your child is going to develop a healthy personality with the capacity to remain intact and grow, she must learn how to test reality, regulate her impulses, stabilize her moods, integrate her feelings and actions, focus her concentration and plan.

  Stanley Greenspan

  Children, Reality, Focus

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• To be faithful to your instincts and the impulses that carry you in the direction of the excellence you most desire and value ... surely that is to lead the noble life.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Faithful, Excellence, Desire

  George Edward Woodberry (1933). “Selected letters of George Edward Woodberry”

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• I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

  Jeanne Julie Eleonore de Lespinasse

  Madness, Abandonment

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• Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Understanding, Perception, Together

  Richard M. Weaver (1985). “The Ethics of Rhetoric”, p.24, Psychology Press

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• Because man is endowed with Reason, he can subdue his impulses in the service of moral and religious ideals, and is born to bear rule over Nature.

  Joseph Hertz

  Religious, Men, Bears

  Joseph Herman Hertz (1996). “ספר חמשה חומשי תורה עם ההפטרות: נדפס על פי המסורה ומתורגם אנגלית”

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• What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Reality, Thinking, Quests

  Czeslaw Milosz's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 8, 1980.

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• We are rarely wrong when we act from impulse.

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon

  Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1837). “Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides”, p.234

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• It is a youthful failing to be unable to control one's impulses.

  Seneca the Younger

  Failing

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