Impulse Quotes - Page 34

• Nothing is more evident, I venture to think, as a result of two or three thousand years of social philosophizing, than that society must live and thrive by way of the native impulses of individual human beings.

  William Ernest Hocking

  Thinking, Two, Years

  "Present Status of the Philosophy of Law and of Rights". Book by William Ernest Hocking, Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 30, p. 68, 1926.

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• The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Energy, Morality, Antisocial

  Wilhelm Reich (1973). “The Discovery of the Orgone”

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• Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Stars, Children, Dark

  H.P. Lovecraft (2005). “At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Edition”, p.107, Modern Library

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• Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.

  J. L. Austin

  Latin, Simplicity, Done

  "A Plea for Excuses". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, www.ditext.com. 1956.

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• Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Law, Energy, Principles

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1997). “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays”, p.264, Macmillan

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• The impulse to think, to philosophize and spin beauty and brilliance out of mind and soul, is somehow the offspring of resistance of an effort to overcome an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Hence cultural creativeness is more likely to flourish in an atmosphere of restriction, of an imposed pattern of thought and behavior, than in one of total freedom.

  Eric Hoffer

  Thinking, Effort, Soul

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• The impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race.

  William James

  Race, Vagueness, Free Will

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.58, 谷月社

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• The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs.... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power; we have no other.

  Mark Twain

  Men, Emergencies, Approval

  Mark Twain (2016). “What Is Man? And Other Essays”, p.21, Xist Publishing

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• I think we need to change that old saying, "I don't need a building to fall on me." Because two did and we still don't get it. I think we all stick our head in the sand as a deep human impulse.

  Bill Maher

  Fall, Thinking, Two

  "When You Ride Alone You Ride with bin Laden". Book by Bill Maher, 2002.

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• The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Race, Evil, Faces

  Theodore Dreiser (2016). “The Financier”, p.217, Open Road Media

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• Most of authors seek fame, but I seek for justice - a holier impulse than ever entered into the ambitious struggles of the votaries of that fickle, flirting goddess.

  Davy Crockett

  Struggle, Flirting, Justice

  Davy Crockett (1859). “Life of Col. David Crockett”, p.7

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• The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature - translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.

  Hans Hofmann

  Art, Lying, Expression

  "Search for the Real: And Other Essays". Book by Hans Hofmann. "Painting and Culture", p. 55, 1948.

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• The impulse of nature, fused through the personality of the artist by laws arising from the particular nature of the medium, produces the rhythm and the personal expression of a work. Then the life of the composition becomes a spiritual unity.

  Hans Hofmann

  Spiritual, Artist, Expression

  "Search for the Real: And Other Essays". Book by Hans Hofmann. "Painting and Culture", p. 58, 1948.

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• The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

  Theodor Adorno

  Strong, Men, Intellectual

  "Minima Moralia". Book by Theodor W. Adorno, 1951.

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• On the left is the realist tradition of the 19th century, with its impulse to social description, radical criticism and meditation on things as they are... culminating in Courbet at his mightiest (The Studio, The Funeral at Ornans and a portrait of a trout that has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion).

  Gustave Courbet

  Funeral, Meditation, Criticism

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• Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Order, Survival, Inbreds

  Rudolf Arnheim (1974). “Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order”, p.3, Univ of California Press

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• We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.

  Northrop Frye

  Dream, Feelings, Life Is

  Northrop Frye, Alvin A. Lee (2006). “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature”, p.101, University of Toronto Press

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• The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Men, Levels, Sanity

  "Dianetics 55!". Book by L. Ron Hubbard, 1954.

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• Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Simple, Political, Want

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1975). “Coping: On the Practice of Government”, Vintage Books USA

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• Chacun peut e  prouver en soi ce double mouvement: de s ir de s'inte  grer a'   la socie  te  , besoin de se re  aliser par soi-me"  me en dehors d'elle. We all have this double impulse within ourselves: the desire to integrate into society, and the need to fulfil ourselves outside of it, through our own efforts.

  Nathalie Sarraute

  Effort, Desire, Needs

  La Quinzaine litte raire, 50.

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• Not the least of the hardships to which the dying are subject is the visitation of their loved ones. The poor darlings, God bless them, may feel every impulse to condole and console, but their primary sensation is nonetheless one of embarrassment in the presence of the unspeakable and a guilty gratitude that it is not yet their fate.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Gratitude, Fate, Dying

  Louis Auchincloss (2004). “East Side Story: A Novel”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success.

  Edward Bellamy

  Luxury, Effort, Desire

  Edward Bellamy (2016). “Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887: American literature”, p.47, VM eBooks

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• As for comics, one has only to turn to the characteristic output of Marvel Comics, for the period from about 1961 to about 1975, to find not an expression of base and cynical impulses but of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism of a kind that may strike us today, God help us, as quaint, but which nevertheless appealed, in story after story, to ideals such as tolerance, technological optimism, and self-sacrifice for the benefit of others.

  Michael Chabon

  Sacrifice, Self, Expression

  Unpublished Letter of Complaint to The New York Review of Books,

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• I think the important thing to understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he was the international emblem of the African American blues spiritual impulse that goes back through slavery - Jim Crow, Jane Crow, up to the present moment, through a Louis Armstrong, through a Ma Rainey, through a Bessie Smith, all the way to John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone.

  Cornel West

  Spiritual, Thinking, African American

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Object in/ and space - the first impulse may be to give the object - a position - to place the object. (The object had a position to begin with.) Next - to change the position of the object. - Rauschenberg's early sculptures - A board with some rocks on it. The rocks can be anywhere on the board. - Cage's Japanese rock garden - The rocks can be anywhere (within the garden).

  Jasper Johns

  Garden, Rocks, Space

  "Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews". Book edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Christel Hollevoe, 1996.

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