Compulsion Quotes

1. "We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like."
Author: Alfred Hitchcock

2. "Bad men... aim at getting more than their share of advantages, while in labor and public service they fall short of their share; and each man wishing for advantage to himself criticizes his neighbor and stands in his way; for if people do not watch it carefully the common weal is soon destroyed. The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just."
Author: Aristotle

3. "If we become aware of its limitations and compulsions, we can transcend them."
Author: B.K.S. Iyengar

4. "For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted."
Author: C.S. Lewis

5. "And there's your pecking order of unhappiness, right there in a nutshell. Of all the overwhelming compulsions you can be ruined by, all of them have some potential for some perverted, self-destructive fascination – except eating."
Author: Caitlin Moran

6. "Zakath stared at the floor. 'I suddenly feel very helpless,' he admitted, 'and I don't like the feeling. I've been rather effectively dethroned, you know. This morning I was the Emperor of the largest nation on earth; this afternoon, I'm going to be a vagabond.'You might find it refreshing,' Silk told him lightly.Shut up, Kheldar,' Zakath said almost absently. He looked back at Polgara. 'You know something rather peculiar?'What's that?'Even if I hadn't given my word, I'd still have to go to Kell. It's almost like a compulsion. I feel as if I'm being driven, and my driver is a blindfolded girl who's hardly more than a child.'There are rewards,' she told him.Such as what?'Who knows? Happiness, perhaps.'He laughed ironically. 'Happiness has never been a driving ambition of mine, Lady Polgara, not for a long time now.'You may have to accept it anyway,' She smiled. 'We aren't allowed to choose our rewards any more than we are our tasks. Those decisions are made for us."
Author: David Eddings

7. "Silk laughed. "You really should try not to let your knife do all your thinking for you. That's the one quality we find least attractive in our Cherek cousins.""And we find this compulsion to make clever remarks which seems to overwhelm our Drasnian brothers now and then almost equally unattractive," Barak told him coolly."
Author: David Eddings

8. "As soon as a friendship passed a certain point - some obscure and secret boundary - a woman quite automatically became overwhelmed by a raging compulsion to complicate things."
Author: David Eddings

9. "Transference is essentially a compulsion to return to our past in order to clear up emotionally backlogged business."
Author: David Richo

10. "Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically."
Author: Diane Ackerman

11. "Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you."
Author: E. Stanley Jones

12. "To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions."
Author: Eckhart Tolle

13. "The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even in ones lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same ole addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma ( and also of western psychology, by the way)- take care of the problem now, or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that repetition of suffering-that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding-there's where you'll find heaven."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

14. "I'd heard about people falling in love, and I'd heard about lust. What I had never heard about was this all-consuming need to be inside another human being. I felt this desperate compulsion to become one with him. This was desire. This was to crave. This was what if felt like to want."
Author: Ella Frank

15. "Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

16. "Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness'; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism."
Author: Francis Parker Yockey

17. "The root of liberalism, in a word, is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys. The liberal has faith in the individual – faith that he can be persuaded by rational means to beliefs compatible with social good."
Author: Harold Edmund Stearns

18. "Thane gazed down at her, his entire world tipped on its axis. He'd never seen anything more miraculous than what he'd just witnessed. He'd never seen anything so beautiful.Can I keep you? The words raced through his mind, a thought - and a nearly undeniable compulsion.Keep you."
Author: Heather Killough Walden

19. "Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self. Jesus himself entered into this furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant ('turn stones into loaves'), to be spectacular ('throw yourself down'), and to be powerful ('I will give you all these kingdoms'). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity ('You must worship the Lord your God and serve him alone'). Solitude is the place of the great struggle and the great encounter - the struggle against the compulsions of the false self, and the encounter with the loving God who offers himself as the substance of the new self."
Author: Henri J.M. Nouwen

20. "We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with Him and Him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. Solitude is a place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world."
Author: Henri J.M. Nouwen

21. "Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends."
Author: Henri J.M. Nouwen

22. "A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state...The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as "reactionary," at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you to pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?"
Author: Isabel Paterson

23. "I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick compulsion of my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor heart. I was only a mind, a soul, a consciousness—call it what you will—incorporate in a nebulous brain that, while it still centered inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing to expand, beyond my skull."
Author: Jack London

24. "Love is found when you don't have to give it. It is the emotion of generosity and kindness that is compelled by no one. It is performed on the battlefield, in our daily tasks, in the marketplace, the factories, at school, in the offices, and in the halls and corridors of government.... But only when one truly gives of himself and without compulsion."
Author: James Michael Pratt

25. "Actually, I'd already briefed him, early this morning. Since we were up at six. Since, at six, the nurse had been overcome with the overwhelming compulsion to take Fang's temperature right then."
Author: James Patterson

26. "The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle."
Author: Joan Didion

27. "When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone."
Author: John Steinbeck

28. "My compulsion is to create things."
Author: Julian Schnabel

29. "How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom."
Author: Karl Rahner

30. "The brain may die, but my compulsion for useless trivia lives on."
Author: Molly Harper

31. "I started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing."
Author: Monica Ali

32. "It was an obsession, it was a compulsion. "The way to banish temptation is to give into it," the saying went. Maybe if she experienced a gangbang, it wouldn't be such a big deal, and would no longer be the focus of her sexual imagination."
Author: Nikki Sex

33. "I decline to discuss, under compulsion, where I have sung, and who has sung my songs, and who else has sung with me, and the people I have known."
Author: Pete Seeger

34. "Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."
Author: Plato

35. "Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord."
Author: Pope Benedict XVI

36. "To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is."
Author: Robert A.F. Thurman

37. "Food compulsion isn't a character disorder; it's a chemical disorder."
Author: Robert Atkins

38. "As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it."
Author: Robert M. Pirsig

39. "Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is."
Author: Sharon Salzberg

40. "...our memory has no guarantees at all, and yet we bow more often than is objectively justified to the compulsion to believe what it says."
Author: Sigmund Freud

41. "That night she admitted her compulsion to escape. She was worried that if my father drowned, or I disappeared, she would be left with nothing. By running away at least she would have the joy of knowing she was missed."
Author: Simon Van Booy

42. "I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make "lists." The things (Beethoven's music, movies, business firms) won't exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province."
Author: Susan Sontag

43. "I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion."
Author: Themistocles

44. "What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity."
Author: Tom Robbins

45. "Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion. Please follow me. Trust me, for deep feeling and understanding require total committment."
Author: Trinh T. Minh Ha

46. "But that is who we are, that is where we come from. We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the division of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From isolation in individual row-houses, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of nonviolence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism."
Author: Ulrike Meinhof

47. "In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

48. "Love? Love is about an unquenchable hunger, a passion so powerful it cannot be ignored. In the face of love," he spoke softly, "all resistance is futile. Sex is momentary, ephemeral ecstasy at best without love. No one with a good opinion of themselves would trade sex by itself if they could have the true geld .. love with a worthy lover. It alters lives, and even the barest slice of true love … a moment, an evening, a day's worth, can become a treasure to be pulled from the memory and ignite those feelings again many years after it has passed. It is the most powerful of all compulsions." Das"
Author: William C. Samples

49. "This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeitof our own behavior,--we make guilty of ourdisasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: asif we were villains by necessity; fools byheavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, andtreachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience ofplanetary influence; and all that we are evil in,by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasionof whoremaster man, to lay his goatishdisposition to the charge of a star."
Author: William Shakespeare

50. "As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice."
Author: Zola Jesus

Compulsion Quotes Pictures