Involuntary Quotes - Page 4

• Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

  Alan Watts

  Practice, Breathing, Bridges

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.71, New World Library

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• Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

  Walter Bagehot

  Life, Campaigns, Half

  Walter Bagehot (1873). “Physics and Politics: Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "natural Selection" and "inheritance" to Political Society”, p.79

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• Most real relationships are involuntary.

  Iris Murdoch

  Real, Real Relationship

  Iris Murdoch (1999). “A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea”

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• One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable--that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.

  H. L. Mencken

  Liars, Lying, Eye

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.325, Vintage

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• I like to think of it less as embezzling and more as an involuntary goodwill contribution.

  Jim Butcher

  Thinking, Contribution, Goodwill

  Jim Butcher (2012). “Cold Days: The Dresden Files, Book Fourteen”, p.278, Hachette UK

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• The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Order, Tasks

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.222, Verso

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• INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mind, Causes, Influence

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.135, University of Georgia Press

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• No one...can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.

  Chris Kraus

  Loss, Two, People

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• The first merit of pictures is the effect which they can produce upon the mind; — and the first step of a sensible man should be to receive involuntary effects from them. Pleasure and inspiration first, analysis afterward.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Art, Inspiration, Men

  "Star Papers: Or, Experiences of Art and Nature".

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• For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.

  George Eliot

  Moving, Years, Soul

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.196, Penguin

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• The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.

  Alexander Lowen

  Beautiful, Philosophy, Stress

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• Dance has been transformed from an involuntary motor discharge, a ceremonial rite, into a work of art, conscious of, intended for, observation.

  Jamake Highwater

  Dance, Art, Dancing

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• Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you dont laugh, youll die.

  Mel Brooks

  Running, Song, Elderly

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• All beginnings are involuntary.

  Fernando Pessoa

  "Message". Book by Fernando Pessoa. Poem "O Conde D. Henrique", verse 1, 1934.

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• Compassion and pity are very different. Whereas compassion reflects the yearning of the heart to merge and take on some of the suffering, pity is a controlled set of thoughts designed to assure separateness. Compassion is the spontaneous response of love; pity, the involuntary reflex of fear.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Heart, Compassion, Suffering

  Ram Dass, Paul Gorman (2011). “How Can I Help?”, p.62, Knopf

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• The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Voice, Whispering

  Herman Melville (1849). “Mardi: And a Voyage Thither”, p.21

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• Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.

  Charles Dickens

  Lows, Homage, Tale Of Two Cities

  Charles Dickens (2016). “A Tale of Two Cities”, p.114, Xist Publishing

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• Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.

  C. S. Lewis

  Falling In Love, May, Improbable

  C. S. Lewis (1966). “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life”, p.200, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Although it has been a carefully guarded secret by the watchdogs of the mainstream media, eugenics programs were never discontinued worldwide, with involuntary sterilization programs continuing in many countries to this day.

  Jim Keith

  Country, Eugenics, Media

  Jim Keith (2003). “Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness”, p.17, Adventures Unlimited Press

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• Love is an involuntary gift that manifests unplanned.

  Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi

  Love Is

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• The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using ‘filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.’ Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral.

  Nicole Brossard

  Memories, Moving, Book

  Nicole Brossard, Larry Shouldice, Patricia Claxton (2003). “The Blue Books: A Book, Turn of a Pang, French Kiss, Or, A Pang's Progress”, p.255, Coach House Books

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• PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Gentleman, Church, Palaces

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.171, 谷月社

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• The imagination acquires by custom a certain involuntary, unconscious power of observation and comparison, correcting its own mistakes, and arriving at precision of judgment, just as the outward eye is disciplined to compare, adjust, estimate, measure, the objects reflected on the back of its retina.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Mistake, Eye, Imagination

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• The evidence here, as elsewhere, suggests that education is certainly relevant, but more because better education is associated with general differences in patterns of life than because discrete parts of a lifestyle can be changed. Health-change policies which focus entirely on the individual may be ineffective not only because exposure to health risks is largely involuntary, but also, as this study has shown, because of unwarranted assumptions about the extent to which behaviour can, in these circumstances, be effective in improving health.

  Mildred Blaxter

  Differences, Focus, Risk

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• Eros is not tranquil-it gives us spikes of happiness rather than a constant feeling of wellbeing. It's the love we feel at the beginning of a love affair and corresponds to the expression 'falling in love' since it is as involuntary an impulse as a physical fall.

  François Lelord

  Falling In Love, Expression, Giving

  "Ideas for modern living: love" by François Lelord, www.theguardian.com. February 12, 2011.

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