Quotes About Compulsions

A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.

And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things. He

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent . . .

When I was a kid, I was very much a perfectionist, and I had a bunch of different compulsions.

I have OCD and, literally, walking on the left, needing things to be in even numbers with few exceptions. One and seven, any number that ends in seven, that's all me. All the tics like the pulling of the ear and scratching of the palms, all me.

Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.

and my heart tightened for the hard compulsions of the poor.

Earlier in my career, there may have been compulsions for accepting films for money.

We all remain who we are. But on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions. This requires clear decisions. Because it does not happen by itself, it is in a way unnatural or supernatural . . . (we) simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process . . . make mistakes.

Galatians 5:18 asks, "Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?" (MSG).

As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings, and fits of emotions begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible: we can say yes, or we can say no. ... All we are is the result of what we have thought. By changing our mode of thinking, we can remake ourselves completely.

What I call Idols are projections of these inner compulsions of human psychology. When an Idol speaks (through its priests) it only says what the Faithful want to hear.

Sometimes you have compulsions that you can't control coming from the subconscious... They are the dictator inside ourselves.

The two diseases also seem to share a neural component. The symptoms of Tourette's apparently arise from impaired inhibition in the circuit linking the cortex and the basal ganglia-a circuit that is also impaired in OCD. The basal ganglia, you'll recall from Chapter 2, play a central role in switching from one behavior to another. Impairment there could account for the perseveration of obsessions and compulsions, as well as the tics characteristic of Tourette's.

We want to imagine ourselves not only as civilized and sophisticated but also as individuals with conscious control of much of what we do. Our group behavior tends to shatter this myth, and historical examples such as the Cultural Revolution frighten us with our own possibilities. We do not like to see ourselves as social animals operating under particular compulsions. It offends our self-opinion as a species.

We are legion, an army of millions. Though most of us will go to any length to hide our compulsions, we recognize one another. The guy using a paper towel to turn the restroom doorknob, the child counting his eyelashes, the old man wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes - these are my brothers. We are a secret tribe. We're like Freemasons, except that our secret handshake is followed by a vigorous washing session.

He who possesses a reasonable, sound theoretical equipment will perceive correctly, however neurotic or wicked he may be personally; he who lacks it or possesses an unsound one, will perceive incorrectly, however pure of neurotic tensions or compulsions he may be.

I've had a lot of compulsions throughout my life which mainly started as a teen around the time I was doing exams.

The best you can hope for in this life is that your delusions are benign and your compulsions have utility.

Only two and a half years before, I had felt threatened by internal "compulsions" that had no name; now I knew I was multiple. Once I had wanted to destroy the other personalities; now I wanted everyone to be happy.

and finally his current self-awareness, tinged with compulsions whose origins he couldn't access or control.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

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.