Quotes About Impulses

Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility

But society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal Impulses and preferences.

Much of our trading comes down to a battle between our patience and our impulses.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

I would make Reason my guide, but she should sometimes sit Patiently by the way-side, while I traced The mazes of the pleasant wilderness Around me. She should be my counsellor, But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs Impulses from a deeper source than hers, And there are motions, in the mind of man, That she must look upon with awe.

Well, first of all, I think that a lot of the voters who are voting for the tea party candidates have really good impulses. That is, they believe that for years and years and years, the people with wealth and power or government power have done well and ordinary people have not. That's true.

Modern society has created a giant apparatus for the cultivation of the hard skills, while failing to develop the moral and emotional faculties down below. Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own.

The secret of successfully giving yourself away lies not so much in calculated actions as in cultivating friendly, warm-hearted impulses. You have to train yourself to obey giving impulses on the instant -- before they get a chance to cool. When you give impulsively, something happens inside of you that makes you glow, sometimes for hours.

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

The Bhagavad-Gita calls on humanity to dedicate body, mind and soul to pure duty and not to become mental voluptuaries at the mercy of random desires and undisciplined impulses.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

For GQ's Andrew Corsello, Louis C.K.'s qualification to be considered El Supremo is that he is more than a comedian—he is a bug zapper of white lies and dark impulses, an urban shaman receiving and transmitting warped vibrations, a psychic surgeon delving into our shifty, cloaked selves.

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect.

But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.

Individuals with a pathological power-drive seek to secure their position in life with extraordinary efforts, with exceptional haste and impatience, with violent impulses, and all without the slightest consideration for others. These are the children whose behaviour is characterized by their frantic strivings towards an exaggerated goal of dominance. Their attacks on the rights of others in turn put their own rights at risk; they are against the world and the world is therefore against them.

One of the things I think about as I've evolved as an architect is, 'Where do the poetic impulses come from?'

Before being a person, man is an animal, with all its reptilian compulsions. And if at some point you block the conscious part of the mind, you've got all the reptilian compulsions that come out.

The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

My larger point is that since each of us struggles daily with good and bad impulses, we might want to restructure our social institutions in order to make it a little easier to be good.

As long as he could remember, he had never been responsible to anyone. The moment a situation became so that it exacted something of him, he rebelled. That was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat or gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared.   Outside

We all do, kid. People have destructive impulses. Some of us want to see the world in ruins just for the fun of it... even if we're ruined along with it.