Impulse Quotes - Page 32

• I don't think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don't think it's the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed into as many females as possible.

  Marlon Brando

  Men, Thinking, Female

  "Kosher Sex : A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy". Book by Shmuley Boteach, 2000.

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• Aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy and use it to explore our world? Aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations, in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and beauty of nature?

  Louis Schwartzberg

  Gratitude, Grateful, Heart

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• You must have the discipline and temperament to resist your impulses. Human beings have precisely the wrong instincts when it comes to the markets. If you recognise this, you can resist the urge to buy into a rally and sell into a decline. It’s also helpful to remember the power of compounding. You don’t need to stretch for returns to grow your capital over the course of your life.

  Irving Kahn

  Discipline, Needs, Return

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• I am a woman / who understands / the necessity of an impulse whose goal or origin / still lie beyond me.

  Olga Broumas

  Lying, Goal, Stills

  Olga Broumas (1999). “Rave: poems, 1975-1999”, Copper Canyon Pr

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• We have learned that beneath the surface of an ordinary everyday normal casual conscious existence there lies a vast dynamic world of impulse and dream, a hinterland of energy which has an independent existence of its own and laws of its own: laws which motivate all our thoughts and our actions.

  Robert Edmond Jones

  Dream, Lying, Independent

  Robert Edmond Jones (2004). “The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre, Reissue”, p.1, Routledge

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• The Great Story of our immense journey contains crucial lessons for guiding humanity safely through the dangers and confusions evident today. This grand epic will propel us forward in a spirit of expectant curiosity. We will place our trust not only in the Whole but also in our own species' capacity to serve as the vessel through which the evolutionary impulse is most active at this time.

  Michael Dowd

  Epic, Journey, Confusion

  Michael Dowd (2008). “Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World”, p.260, Penguin

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• It’s the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No, we have a healthy attitude. We like it, it’s fun, it’s jolly; because it’s a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It’s a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic church in a nutshell.

  Stephen Fry

  Sex, Fun, Attitude

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• Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

  Moving, America, Order

  "Democracy in America". Book by Alexis de Tocqueville. Chapter V, 1835.

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• Men may be very learned, and yet very miserable; it is easy to be a deep geometrician, or a sublime astronomer, but very difficult to be a good man. I esteem, therefore, the traveller who instructs the heart, but despise him who only indulges the imagination. A man who leaves home to mend himself and others, is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is only a vagabond.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Country, Home, Heart

  Oliver Goldsmith (1854). “The works of Oliver Goldsmith. 2: Enquiry into the present state of polite learning; The citizen of the world”, p.106

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• Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Love Is, Men, Hands

  Rainer Maria Rilke, John J. L. Mood (1994). “Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.

  George Steiner

  Art, Skills, Degrees

  George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.43, Faber & Faber

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• The dramatic sufferings of adults and all the cruel fantasies of those of my own age, who seemed abandoned to their own impulses in the midst of so many catastrophes, appeared to inscribe themselves on the walls around me.

  Antoni Tapies

  Wall, Suffering, Age

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• Natural writers will often try to force themselves into a form - novel, story, screenplay, or poem - that is not necessarily the appropriate form for the way they see the world... if, in fact, they are writing from the artist's impulse, which is a deep, inchoate vision of some sort of order behind the apparent chaos of life on planet earth, they'll be driven then to express that vision in the creation of the object - the art object.

  Robert Olen Butler

  Art, Writing, Order

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• One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.

  Carl Jung

  Powerful, Greatness, Men

  Carl Gustav Jung, Beatrice M. Hinkle (2003). “Psychology of the Unconscious”, p.16, Courier Corporation

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• When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Religious, Art, Children

  "A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals, Book 1)". Book by Madeleine L'Engle, 1971.

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• THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY WAS DUE PRIMARILY TO A NEW BURST OF RELIGIOUS LIFE EMANATING FROM THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE. . . . NEVER IN ANY CORRESPONDING LENGTH OF TIME HAD THE CHRISTIAN IMPULSE GIVEN RISE TO SO MANY NEW MOVEMENTS. NEVER HAD IT HAD QUITE SO GREAT AN EFFECT UPON WESTERN EUROPEAN PEOPLES. IT WAS FROM THIS ABOUNDING VIGOR THAT THERE ISSUED THE MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE WHICH DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SO AUGMENTED THE NUMERICAL STRENGTH AND THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

  Kenneth Scott Latourette

  Christian, Religious, Missionary

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• On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.

  Jacques Barzun

  Art, Reflection, Issues

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.69, Wesleyan University Press

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• The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.

  Jacques Barzun

  Rights, Law, Practice

  "The Culture We Deserve" by Jacques Barzun, Wesleyan University Press, (p. 97), 1989.

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• The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hate, War, Patriotic

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• Most men do not feel in themselves the competence required for leading their group to victory, and therefore seek out a captain who appears to possess the courage and sagacity necessary for the achievement of supremacy. Even in religion this impulse appears. Nietzsche accused Christianity of inculcating a slave-morality, but ultimate triumph was always the goal. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

  Bertrand Russell

  Blessed, Men, Goal

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “Power: A New Social Analysis”, p.29, Routledge

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• Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

  Andre Breton

  Painting, Metaphor, Modern

  "Chagall: A Biography". Book by Jackie Wullschlagger, 2008.

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• The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.

  Otto Weininger

  Men, Giving, Insanity

  "Sex and Character" by Otto Weininger, (pp. 122-123), 1906.

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• There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience: they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power -- God, history, fate, nation, or humanity.

  Bruce Lee

  Strong, Powerful, Responsibility

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee: Artist of Life”, p.240, Tuttle Publishing

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• Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he (Richard II) was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Views, Years, Disease

  "A Distant Mirror". Book by Barbara Tuchman, p. 534, 1978.

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• Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence?

  Upton Sinclair

  Fate, Animal, Men

  "The Profits of Religion : An Essay in Economic Interpretation". Book by Upton Sinclair, Introductory, "Bootstrap-lifting", 1918.

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