Top 100 Involuntary Quotes
#1. Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.
Toby Keith
#2. Mindgasm (noun) - An exhilarating neurostorm of intense intellectual pleasure. Fully revelatory understanding of a certain topic. Involuntary contractions of brain muscles usually accompanied by the overwhelming sensation of truth proximity. Visionarism. State of awe.
Jason Silva
#3. What Can be Promised. - Actions can be promised, but not feelings, for these are involuntary. Whoever promises somebody to love him always, or to hate him always, or to be ever true to him, promises something that it is out of his power to bestow.
Anonymous
#4. [Heraclitus had] the highest form of pride [stemming] from a certainty of belief in the truth as grasped by himself alone. He brings this form, by its excessive development, into a sublime pathos by involuntary identification of himself with his truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#5. She seemed to Bond to give a quick involuntary shrug of the shoulders as she spoke, but then she leant impulsively towards him. 'I have some news for you from Mathis. He was longing to tell you himself. It's about the bomb. It's a fantastic story.
Ian Fleming
#6. My retirement is both voluntary and involuntary. One reason, and this is voluntary, is the impact of television. All old movies are turning up on television, and frankly, making pictures doesn't interest me anymore. Another reason is that the film industry is in a declining state.
Randolph Scott
#7. We may state the question thus: - Imitation imitates the actions of men, whether voluntary or involuntary, on which, as they imagine, a good or bad result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly. Is there anything more? No, there is nothing else. But
Plato
#8. It's a guy thing. We have reactions to women in tight leather with whips. It's sort of involuntary.
Rachel Caine
#9. The blinking of eyes is an involuntary reflex action, provided they eyes are not watching your beauty.
Amit Kalantri
#10. Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.
Walter Bagehot
#12. Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.
Blaise Pascal
#13. Strongholds are developed from our habits (an act repeated so often that it becomes involuntary, there is no new decision of mind each time the act is performed). Strongholds can also be birthed from judgments that have been made when wounding occurs or when the basic needs of life are not met.
Jack Frost
#14. I had never in all my life felt so elated. Peter cared for me! It was a miracle I longed to celebrate - to tell all Hertfordshire - and I had to hold my hand to my mouth against an involuntary smile.
Jennifer Paynter
#15. Feelings are involuntary reactions, so God does not say, "Feel joy." He says, "Rejoice!" It's a choice.
George Foster
#17. although the stress response was involuntary, the relaxation response required practice.[6]
Linda Lantieri
#18. All emotion is involuntary when genuine.
Mark Twain
#19. Obedience in the womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days.
James Joyce
#20. The first merit of pictures is the effect they produce on the mind; and the first step of a sensible man should be to receive involuntary impressions from them. Pleasure and inspiration first; analysis, afterward.
Henry Ward Beecher
#21. Matthew did remember saying something like that once - long before he'd met Diana. He made an involuntary check on the house. It was a combination of instinct and reflex now, this need to
Deborah Harkness
#22. No one ... can live in this heightened state of reflective receptivity forever. Because this empathy's involuntary, there's terror here. Loss of control, a seepage. Becoming someone else or worse: becoming nothing but the vibratory field between two people.
Chris Kraus
#23. Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.
C.S. Lewis
#24. You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#25. And I don't want to talk about it, because one day his name will brush against my lips in her presence, and through and involuntary blushing of the cheeks, a misting of the eyes, a breath drawn too tightly, or a single tear, the secret I'm supposed to keep locked up forever will be revealed
Sarah Ockler
#26. I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and ... almost involuntary in my life.
Mary Oliver
#27. A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest.
If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.
Jack Kerouac
#28. Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#29. Habits are one of the ways the brain learns complex behaviors. Neuroscientists believe habits give us the ability to focus our attention on other things by storing automatic responses in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with involuntary actions.
Nir Eyal
#30. Love may be likened to a disease in this respect, that when it is denied a vent in one part, it will certainly break out in another; hence what a woman's lips often conceal, her eyes, her blushes, and many little involuntary actions betray.
Henry Fielding
#31. Dance has been transformed from an involuntary motor discharge, a ceremonial rite, into a work of art, conscious of, intended for, observation.
Jamake Highwater
#32. If you count all forms of involuntary displacement - formal and informal evictions, landlord foreclosures, building condemnations - you discover that between 2009 and 2011 more than 1 in 8 Milwaukee renters experienced a forced move.
Matthew Desmond
#33. Catholic sex is twenty minutes of pleading and whining (Vatican-approved foreplay), thirty seconds of involuntary shuddering and an hour of apologizing to God.
Lionel Fisher
#34. May one plead, Your Honor, postmodernism as an involuntary condition?
Jonathan Lethem
#35. For me, nostalgia is an involuntary emotion. I think it's just a natural human response to loss.
Michael Chabon
#36. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation , an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man.
There can be no such thing as the right to enslave .
Ayn Rand
#38. How often our involuntary facial motions testify to the thoughts we were keeping secret, and betray us to those around!
Michel De Montaigne
#39. I wanted to know more about the young ... strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.
Dodie Smith
#40. There are myriad kisses in a relationship: desperate ones as involuntary as breathing, stolen ones on crowded trains, ceremonial ones at the front door, routine ones as dispassionate as licking an envelope. It takes two to kiss, but does it take two to hold the memory?
Stephanie Ye
#41. Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other ... now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how from the past.
Philip K. Dick
#42. But the trouble with falling in love was that it was involuntary, no matter how well you knew it was a bad idea, if it was going to happen, it happened, and you couldn't prevent it, however much you wanted to.
Katie Fforde
#43. Laughter is involuntary. If it's funny you laugh.
Tom Lehrer
#44. One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. Although it has been a carefully guarded secret by the watchdogs of the mainstream media, eugenics programs were never discontinued worldwide, with involuntary sterilization programs continuing in many countries to this day.
Jim Keith
#46. Many of the gunters on the front lines took an involuntary step backward. A few others turned and ran for their lives.
Ernest Cline
#47. Sharp. Intense. Powerful. Intoxicating.
Just like Killian.
Damn it all.
Before she could stop herself, Sadie took an involuntary step back.
Killian countered, taking one step closer, and his lips tilted into a lopsided grin.
Shit on a stick.
How annoying.
Sara Humphreys
#48. INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.
Ambrose Bierce
#49. Believing isn't a choice ... belief is an involuntary response to something you've learned or experienced.
Neil Carter
#50. Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of *not* picking up and *not* opening all the other books in the universe.
Pierre Bayard
#51. I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.
Mary MacLane
#52. Statutes that curtail her abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state's asserted interest.
Dawn Johnsen
#53. Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years?
John Taylor Gatto
#55. It is impossible to read this opening paragraph without an involuntary feeling of religious awe; it breathed the very savor of Gospel antiquity. The sincerity of the author heightens his power of language.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#56. It is not an "imitation of Christ" but its exact opposite: an assimilation of the Christ-image to his own self, which is the "true man."349 It is no longer an effort, an intentional straining after imitation, but rather an involuntary experience of the reality represented by the sacred legend. This
C. G. Jung
#57. Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control.
John Holdren
#59. Ian was egotistical, perverted, and morally bankrupt, but he wasn't prone to overreacting about anything except involuntary abstinence.
Jeaniene Frost
#61. one motion of individual want sends trembles around a circle of dependents, until the whole helpless ring knocks and shakes like a tray of wineglasses in an unsteady waiter's hands. Any music they make is random, involuntary and brief; one can't be still unless they all are, and they never are.
Jim Lewis
#62. PRIMATE, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminster Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead.
Ambrose Bierce
#63. For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.
George Eliot
#64. An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.
Iain Sinclair
#65. Gentleness in the gait is what simplicity is in the dress. Violent gestures or quick movements inspire involuntary disrespect.
Honore De Balzac
#66. Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.
Blaise Pascal
#67. Modern slavery - be it bonded labor, involuntary servitude, or sexual slavery - is a crime and cannot be tolerated in any culture, community, or country ... [It] is an affront to our values and our commitment to human rights.
Hillary Clinton
#68. Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.
Plato
#69. Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it
Thomas Szasz
#70. You never know how the loss will come -- whether he will lose you or you him, but it is a certainty that there will be a shattering involuntary separation. Death is the abandonment caused not by betrayal but by fidelity.
Jeanne Safer
#71. The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.
Sarah Bernhardt
#72. The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.
Kate Millett
#73. When I saw the car pulling into the driveway and I saw her getting out and walking towards the house, can you imagine Nadezhda, I performed involuntary excretion in my trousers.
Marina Lewycka
#75. Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Mark Twain
#76. All responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind
Philip K. Dick
#77. Laughter is one of the great beacons in life because we don't refract it by gunning it through our intellectual prism. What makes us laugh is a mystery - an involuntary response.
Dennis Miller
#78. My sorrow may bear involuntary witness against you at the judgement Throne; but my angry thoughts or my reproaches never will, I know!
Charles Dickens
#79. Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you dont laugh, youll die.
Mel Brooks
#80. Love is involuntary. It does not often run in a yoke with prudence.
Anthony Trollope
#81. The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.
Bryan Stevenson
#82. Faced with a brass band that was positioned to drown out free speech, Russian activists reacted to the potential confrontation with lemons. With activists eating lemons or pretending to, involuntary saliva reaction of the band made it impossible for them to interrupt.
Masha Gessen
#83. Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections in holy men.
Saint Augustine
#84. Eros is not tranquil - it gives us spikes of happiness rather than a constant feeling of wellbeing. It's the love we feel at the beginning of a love affair and corresponds to the expression 'falling in love' since it is as involuntary an impulse as a physical fall.
Francois Lelord
#85. the involuntary loss of any familiar object almost always brings a chill as from an evil omen; it seems to be the first finger-shadow of advancing death. From
George Eliot
#86. Why were they prepaying so fast? Vinny asked himself. "It made no sense to me. Then I saw that the reason the prepayments were so high is that they were involuntary.
Michael Lewis
#87. Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.
Paul Bowles
#88. At one time, due to the reluctance of cult groups to allow members to dialogue with their families and professionals about their involvement (or even to allow families access to a loved one) -"involuntary deprogramming" became the choice of some families as a last resort.
Rick Ross
#89. Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.
Charles Dickens
#90. Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
Iris Murdoch
#91. Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.
Chuck Palahniuk
#92. Of course it landed in my gut to a total panic response, because I wasn't expecting anyone, and didn't seem able to anticipate anything but more trouble. I try not to think that way, but it's more a feeling than a thought, and besides, it's an involuntary response.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#93. All laughter is a muscular rigidity spasmodically relieved by involuntary twitching.
Robert Benchley
#97. Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.
Gerald Brenan
#98. The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, near-sightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We seem tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.
John Cheever
#99. Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past.
John Thorn
#100. Asked to explain how he became a war hero he (Kennedy) responded, It was involuntary. They think my boat.
Sally Bedell Smith
