Top 100 Impulse To Quotes
#1. A curious observation is the uniform way that committees review curriculum for each field of study. Too often, authorities have a knee-jerk impulse to declare that 'all curriculum areas will be the same.' In fact, real and significant differences exist between fields of study.
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
#2. The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#3. Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.
Franz Kafka
#4. But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful! Distrust all those who talk much of their justice!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on to the sidewalk.
Robert Benchley
#6. In this light my spirit suddenly saw through all, and in and by all creatures, even in herbs and grass it knew God, who he is, and how he is, and what his will is: And suddenly in that light my will was set on by a mighty impulse, to describe the being of God.
Jakob Bohme
#7. Ivan felt an intense hatred for him before he had thought about him at all. Suddenly he realised his presence and felt an irresistible impulse to knock him down.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#8. The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole.
Eric Hoffer
#9. There's always been a religious strain in me. I can't get rid of it. I don't want to get rid of it. I'm not involved in a church, but I understand that impulse to believe in something that's never going to betray you.
Ruth Wilson
#10. The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
#11. The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Aldous Huxley
#12. Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?
David Byrne
#13. Nothing poisons love more than honesty. If love lasts until the day we die, we will live without showing our real self to our beloved until the day we die. Love makes us more beautiful and distorts us. Love takes our impulse to lie to an extreme.
Yang Gui-ja
#14. The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
George Santayana
#15. Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
Yukio Mishima
#16. She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.
Holly Black
#17. We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest. The
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#18. The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king.
Johann Joachim Becher
#19. Oozing Street was oddly cheerful, with flower boxes hanging from windowsills and houses painted bright colors; even the slaughterhouse that anchored it was an inviting robin's-egg blue, and I resisted an odd impulse to go inside and ask for a tour.
Ransom Riggs
#20. My generation came at a time when photography was advancing by leaps and bounds, creating the impulse to experiment and seek new approaches.
Gjon Mili
#21. At the root of all the various manifestations of dancing lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalize emotional states which we cannot externalize by rational means.
Jamake Highwater
#22. The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.
John D'Agata
#23. The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.
Thomas Berry
#24. The impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist
Amanda Palmer
#25. By associating votive offerings with sacred images, the Catholic Church, it its wisdom, had left its formerly pagan flock a legitimate outlet for the inveterate impulse to associate oneself, or one's own effigy, with the Divine as expressed in the palpable form of the human image.
Aby Warburg
#26. To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.
George MacDonald
#27. It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation ... Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you
you come at it over unmarked snow.
William Stafford
#28. Consciousness is the basis of all life and the field of all possibilities. Its nature is to expand and unfold its full potential. The impulse to evolve is thus inherent in the very nature of life.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#29. It's true though, that the impulse to give freely to the world seems to be at the bottom of the well of human intentions where the purest and clearest water arises. To be able to offer back what the world has given you, but shaped a little by your touch - that makes a true life.
John Tarrant
#30. The divine is a mystery, so the impulse to really discover, like a child, has to be the core response to anything.
Darrell Calkins
#31. It is not enough to recognize what is right and true. One must control the impulse to do what is wrong and easy.
Andy Andrews
#32. As the saw teeth caught on the bone, she had performed a second surgery, one less bloody but no less brutal, excising from his heart the impulse to run, to cower, to let the man bleed to death rather than face the horror of saving him. The amputation had left both patients lighter. p 121-122
Anthony Marra
#33. There are, if I may so say, three powerful spirits, which have from time to time, moved on the face of the waters, and given a predominant impulse to the moral sentiments and energies of mankind. These are the spirits of liberty, of religion, and of honor. - HALLAM, Europe in the Middle Ages.
Inazo Nitobe
#34. The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke's plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson's nor Lanrezac alter Joffre's.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#35. A leader who arrives in a new setting, or inherits a big role, needs to curb the impulse to display his manhood.
Alex Ferguson
#36. I think there are a lot of actors who act because they have an impulse to do it and they can't ignore it.
Kristen Stewart
#37. I know it's difficult in the beginning. But, listen. If you have the impulse to write, do yourself a favor, do the world a favor, and write.
Christy Hall
#38. Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.
E. O. Wilson
#39. For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.
Plutarch
#40. The world that we must seek is a world in which the creative spirit is alive, in which life is an adventure full of joy and hope, based rather upon the impulse to construct than upon the desire to retain what we possess or to seize what is possessed by others.
Bertrand Russell
#41. She had a silly impulse to add, But she was alive an hour ago! And she stopped herself, because death is like that: people are alive until they die. "Yes.
Diana Wynne Jones
#42. He was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered.
Laird Barron
#43. God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best.
Robert Collyer
#44. Sometimes when I sit down to practice and there is no one else in the room, I have to stifle an impulse to ring for the elevator man and offer him money to come in and hear me.
Arthur Rubinstein
#45. If the impulse to daring and bravery is too fierce and violent, stay it with guidance and instruction.
Xun Zi
#46. We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.
William Deresiewicz
#47. The impulse to win is a valuable thing, right up until you let it make you into a loser.
Tana French
#48. Symptoms: an unreasonable belief that everyone around him was crazy, a homicidal impulse to machine-gun strangers, retrospective falsification, an unfounded suspicion that people hated him and were conspiring to kill him.
Joseph Heller
#49. Meant to give a new impulse to the race - to rouse human creatures to new moods, to thrust them into places where they see new things. Men and women are being dragged out of their self-absorbed corners and stirred up and shaken.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#50. Mary-Lynnette had an inexplicable impulse to knock Ash flat and fall down on top of him. She'd never felt that for any boy before.
L.J.Smith
#52. The words hit, a sucker punch that first inspired pain, then a powerful impulse to strike back.
Rob Thomas
#53. It is love rather than sexual lust or unbridled sexuality if, in addition to the need or want involved, there is also some impulse to give pleasure to the persons thus loved and not merely to use them for our own selfish pleasure.
Mortimer Adler
#54. More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.
Patti Smith
#55. Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen than it inspires an impulse to practice.
Plutarch
#56. The impulse to explain is the Achilles' heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.
Tom Bissell
#57. Is not the tremendous strength in men of the impulse to creative work in every field precisely due to their feeling of playing a relatively small part in the creation of living beings, which constantly impels them to an overcompensation in achievement?
Karen Horney
#58. The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it.
Joni Mitchell
#59. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
Lily King
#60. I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.
Jandy Nelson
#61. Human beings are innately loving beings. When we fail to love, it is because an element of ignorance has intruded into our experience, submerging our natural impulse to love.
Nhat Hanh
#62. I actually think every person can make a difference. Every single human being has within the impulse to express more of who they truly are.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#63. Solitude is a virtue for us, since it is a sublime inclination and impulse to cleanliness which shows that contact between people, "society", inevitably makes things unclean. Somewhere, sometime, every community makes people - "base.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.
James Salter
#65. I shouldn't be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. for a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her.
Mary Gaitskill
#66. We carried bottled water and day packs and cameras, except for Fred, who said he didn't believe in taking photographs; he planned to store his memories in his head, an idea I found incomprehensibly radical. My impulse to record was almost on par with my impulse to travel
Elisabeth Eaves
#67. The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself.
Jane Addams
#69. The pure, the bright, the beautiful, That stirred our hearts in youth, The impulse to a wordless prayer, The dreams of love and truth; The longings after something lost, The spirit's yearning cry, The striving after better hopes ... These things can never die.
Ruskin Bond
#70. We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling "life is a dream" becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
Northrop Frye
#71. Resistance is usually ascribed to bodies at rest, and impulse to those in motion, but motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished; nor are those bodies always truly at rest, which commonly are taken to be so.
Isaac Newton
#72. Passion is not friendly. It is arrogant,
superbly contemptuous of all that is not
itself, and, as they very definition of passion
implies the impulse to freedom, it has a might
intimidiating power. It contains a challenge.
It contains an unspeakable hope.
James Baldwin
#73. Memory, imagination, and passionately responding in accord with the deeply embedded impulse to act with decency are pliable mechanisms that we can employ to attain happiness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#74. I find myself applying the addict's impulse to how I cruise. I don't look at the ass. If I see a hot guy walking towards me I look at his arm, and if he has a vein I fantasize about shooting up with him.
Kevin Sessums
#75. The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#76. The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.
Stephen R. Covey
#77. Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party.
Dylan Thomas
#78. The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.
Paul Theroux
#79. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
H.L. Mencken
#80. Vision - It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own.
Robert Collier
#81. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln
#83. The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.
August Wilson
#85. The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.
Arthur Miller
#86. How could I have missed it? Easy. Deep in grief over Casey leaving, I'd gone on automatic pilot this morning, barely glancing in the mirror as I brushed my hair, smoothed on my makeup. I clamp down on the impulse to dig out a mirror and check out the 'mark.
Magda Alexander
#87. I resisted a strong impulse to pluck out my eye and show it to them.
Steve Toltz
#88. Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way.
Henry James
#89. Torn between the impulse to stroke his head, and the urge to cave it in with a rock, I did neither.
Diana Gabaldon
#90. The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
Richard Wright
#91. The impulse to investigate can only be set free if you stop pretending to know answers that you don't. Because the incentives to pretend are so strong, this may require some bravery on your part.
Steven D. Levitt
#92. So, to put it perfectly frankly, I was horny. I was horny and Paine was attractive and charming and he had this tiny little hint of danger that made my lady bits clench in what I was convinced was a prehistoric, biological impulse to mate with an alpha male to pass on good genes to a new generation.
Jessica Gadziala
#93. Who says "hypothesis" renounces the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is, accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse to welcome it as true.
William James
#94. Under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts,
must have wondered at my impulse to touch her,
which was like touching myself,
the way your own hand feels when you hold it
because you want to feel contained.
Mark Doty
#95. I take a step closer to her because that's my impulse - to be near her.
Emery Lord
#97. Those who feel the impulse to pursue the path of enlightenment should immediately take the step, and not defer it while they attend to all the other things on their mind.
Yoshida Kenko
#98. The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
John Berger
#99. Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.
Karl Jaspers
#100. There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.
Joan Didion
