Quotes About Impulses

Every variety of the name of flesh, old flesh quailing upon aged bones, or the unquenched flesh of boys and women on limbs infirm with the desires that could be represented in effigy but not be slaked except in mime — for they were desires engendered in the forests of the mind, belonging not to themselves but to remote ancestors speaking through them. Lust belongs to the egg and its seat is below the level of psyche.

But there's no wall down there, Keller thinks, smiling. And there never will be. A border is something that divides us but also unites us; there can be no real wall, just as there is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst. Keller knows. He's been on both sides of the border. He takes Mari's hand and together they limp back down the hill.

The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.

If I would put my talent on the table, if I would control my impulses, if I would make decisions and plans for my own life, then I could be successful.

There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Kids are different from adults. They are not as developed as far as brain science, controlling impulses, and maturity, and fall prey to all kinds of pressures.

We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

But when the next time approached for the full moon, I began to be aware of a strange, malicious influence. An atmosphere of horror hovered in the air and I was aware of inexplicable, uncanny impulses.

Most people have liberty. They can go where they want and do the things they feel like doing. But too many people are also slaves to their impulses. They have grown reactive rather than proactive, meaning that they are like seafoam pounding against a rocky shore, going in whatever direction the tide might take them.

Human motivation is very complex. Most people don't really know why they do things.

Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes a person's noblest impulses.

Human beings behaved the way they behaved, decided the way they decided, driven by an amalgam of genes and impulses and evolution and instincts and drives and mysterious unconscious controllers that fooled the conscience into believing it was in charge.

Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide a harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting.

Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.

The basic distinction between the individual and the crowd is that the individual acts after reasoning, deliberation, and analysis; a crowd acts on feeling, emotion, and impulses.

Futile and sensitive, I'm capable of violent and consuming impulses – both good and bad, noble and vile – but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

I see how in everything men are slaves to their unconscious temperament, to external circumstances, to impulses to be with people or to be alone that collide in and with that temperament as if it were nothing.

I do think that the Constitution and the traditions of this country constrain all of us - those of us in Congress and those of us in the White House - from some of our impulses, shall I say, that we'd like to pursue.

As the world's getting filled with temptations, we're getting a bit frivolous and a bit fickle.

Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.

What is best in Freud is his sensing the paradox of being a highly social animal: being at our core libidinous, rapacious, and generally selfish, yet having to live civilly with other human beings—having to reach our animal goals via a tortuous path of cooperation, compromise, and restraint. From this insight flows Freud's most basic idea about the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality.

My instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works. It's full of electrical impulses. It's like a computer. If you stimulate one part of the brain with an electrode, it... - They know nothing.