Impulse Quotes - Page 38

• Man... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love.

  Lionel

  Struggle, Simple, Men

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• Europe has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Europe, Religion

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1851). “Essays, lectures and orations”, p.510

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• Cruel impulses stir all about my kindly heart.

  Mason Cooley

  Heart, Cruelty

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• Lust and self-mutilation are closely related impulses. There are also self-mutilators among knowers: they do not want to be creators under any circumstances.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Self, Lust, Want

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• To our strongest impulse, to the tyrant in us, not only our reason but also our conscience yields.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Yield, Tyrants, Reason

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• In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Sunset, Autumn

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• It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, whena thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Creativity, Men, Genius

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1621, Delphi Classics

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• With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Air, House, Inspire

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2006). “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems”, p.180, Bantam Classics

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• Fear of my cruel impulses makes me kind.

  Mason Cooley

  Kindness, Fear, Kind

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• Interestingly, anger and lust are also elusive states once they have passed. Trying to recall why you were angry about something when you've calmed down is like trying to remember why you were in love with someone who no longer attracts you: the initial impulse triggering the emotion is impossible to recapture.

  Gina Barreca

  Anger, Feelings, Lust

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• My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse - to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Beautiful, Writing, Southern Utah

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• Man peoples his current living space with a world of his own, crowded with the offspring of his fancies, desires, impulses, and passions.

  Annie Besant

  Karma, Passion, Men

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• You actually do confront your dark side, your impulses, or your feelings of sibling rivalry in Cinderella or whatever. You admit that they exist and then you work through them and conquer them and come out living happily ever after having learned something. That's one reason why the fairy tales keep having traction and meaning.

  Catherine Hardwicke

  Sibling, Dark, Feelings

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• I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that.

  Patti Smith

  Phrases, Walt, Multitudes

  Source: www.spin.com

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• Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off.

  James Surowiecki

  Jobs, People, Able

  "Ask the Author Live: James Surowiecki on Procrastination". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. October 1, 2010.

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• Those of us who have transcended mythical belief systems know without any doubt that there is no God up in the sky. But when we awaken to what I call the evolutionary impulse - the mysterious passion to evolve, to become, to develop on every level-we rediscover who God is.

  Andrew Cohen

  Passion, Sky, Doubt

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• While the mind is in doubt, it is driven this way and that by a slight impulse.

  Terence

  Educational, Doubt, Mind

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• When the mind is in a state of uncertainty the smallest impulse directs it to either side.

  Terence

  Doubt, Mind, Sides

  "Andria", I, 5, 32, as quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations, p. 826, 1922.

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• Out of the freedom from worry that God's generosity provides comes an impulse toward simplicity rather than accumulation.

  John Piper

  Worry, Generosity, Simplicity

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• The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

  Kenneth Clark

  People, Achievement, Catholic

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• So long as men are compassionate to such a degree that they cannot hear a fly struggling in a spider's web without emotion it can never be reasonably maintained that it is their natural impulse to wound and kill the dumb animals, or to butcher one another in what is called the field of honour.

  John Newton

  Struggle, Animal, Men

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• Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.

  George P. Baker

  Immature, Humans, Felt

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• Dark impulses certainly exist in me and, I think, in most people.

  Stephen Hopkins

  Dark, Thinking, People

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• Thought reflexes get conditioned very strongly, and they are very hard to change. And the also interfere. A reflex may connect to the endorphins and produce an impulse to hold that whole pattern forther. In other words, it produces a defensive reflex. Not merely is it stuck because it's chemically so well built up, but also there is a defensive reflex which defends against evidence which might weaken it. Thus it all happens, one reflex after another after another. It's just a vast system of reflexes. And they form a 'structure' as they get more rigid.

  David Bohm

  May, Patterns, Might

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• Maintaining joy in God takes 'work'; that is, it's a fight against every impulse for alien joys and every obstacle in the way to seeing and savoring Christ.

  John Piper

  Fighting, Joy, Way

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