Quotes About Compulsion

Popcorn! Our fatal weakness!

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.

Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.

A good book is like an unreachable itch. You just can't leave it alone.

For every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.

An artist is nothing without his or her obsessions, and I have mine.

The need is necessary.

A German infantryman wrote in his diary, 'Courage has nothing to do with it. The fear of death surpasses all other feelings and terrible compulsion alone drives the soldier forward.'22

This obsession you have with funnel cake isn't healthy,

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

He had to have her, he couldn't wait, the need throbbed through him hot and urgent. But here? On the wooden floor of his brother's gazebo?

I tried to avoid looking at the skull, but somehow I wanted to keep checking that it was still there. It's like when you have a sore in your mouth or tooth ache – your tongue keeps going back to check it still hurts.

Grace thought, Perhaps I ought to comment on some news. Unfortunately Grace was one of those people who can become a bore and an irritation to others and an anguish to themselves because their lives are dominated by "ought". "What ought I to do? Do you think I ought to -"... They refuse to let a situation rest; they must tamper with it, adjust it, change it, impose upon it their immediate concern of "ought".

Books are like a disease. Once you've got it, it's incurrable and lifelong

Here's a haiku/palindrome I wrote called, "Obsession." Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob

Do I have to talk to insane people?" "You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.

You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

Nonreaction to the ego in others is one of the most effective ways not only of going beyond ego in yourself but also of dissolving the collective human ego. But you can only be in a state of nonreactor if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.

Even such a seemingly trivial and normal thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death [of the ego].

The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind. This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be.

Even such a seemingly trivial and normal thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death.

For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong — defending the mental position with which you have identified — is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation.

compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

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.