Top 100 Quotes About Compulsion
#1. I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.
John Hodgman
#2. 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.
Eckhart Tolle
#3. All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within, their source was a fateful compulsion. What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself. I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.
Carl Jung
#4. He that would be a painter must have a natural turn thereto. Love and delight therein are better of the Art of Painting than compulsion.
Albrecht Durer
#5. When we experience the power of the Self, there is an absence of fear, there is no compulsion to control, and no struggle for approval or external power.
Deepak Chopra
#6. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were.
Eckhart Tolle
#7. Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.
E. Stanley Jones
#8. Where there is a will there is a way. And this must be the way not of compulsion but of cooperation ... No government and no plan can succeed without it.
Lionel Murphy
#9. Grammar is like your overarching compulsion. It's math with words.
Thomm Quackenbush
#10. Wanderlust is like itchy feet. It's when you can't settle down. But Wanderlove is much deeper than that ... it's a compulsion. It's the difference between lust and love.
Kirsten Hubbard
#11. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties. Whether
Eric Metaxas
#12. The compulsion to work long years in pursuit of some inner vision must be fueled by stubborn fires.
Silvia Tennenbaum
#13. The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Carolyn Heilbrun
#14. Language was both his livelihood and his addiction and he was often preyed upon by a near irresistible compulsion to eavesdrop on conversations in public places.
Amitav Ghosh
#15. Andrew Lloyd Webber is one of those odd moth-like creatures who seem to combine extreme discomfort with the spotlight with an unstoppable compulsion to leap into it.
Craig Brown
#16. Writing is a compulsion
Airam
#17. And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is
even when wholly well intentioned, particularly when wholly well intentioned
is the source of all our troubles.
Mark Slouka
#18. A large fraction of our total economy has grown up around providing service and counseling to inadequate people
and inadequate people are the main product of government compulsion schools.
John Taylor Gatto
#19. Contact would hurt, might be fatal, and yet she couldn't stop herself. Obsession or compulsion, she didn't know, but she did know that before this was over, she'd either end up in Dmitri's bed ... or one of them would bleed darkest red.
Nalini Singh
#20. Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.
Plato
#21. It was a vicious circle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew. Our home was like an artists' colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits. And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.
Alison Bechdel
#22. It's funny - when I first started as an actor, obviously there were long periods of being idle and all you want to do is work. So if I ever get the compulsion to feel like I should complain or feel like I want to take a break, I just remember how I was before and be very grateful for it.
Neil Jackson
#23. My compulsion to always be working has become less strong and my current business is purely down to this enormous alimony. If I wasn't doing this I'd be making documentaries about wildlife and other subjects that interest me.
John Cleese
#24. Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.
Siri Hustvedt
#25. I know I don't want to ask this, but the compulsion's more than I can bear. What's kind of human?" Ash
"She's a ghost." Nick
"What kind of idiot dates a ghost?" Ash
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#26. What is your name?" she murmured.
He cocked an eyebrow at her and then went back to staring at his brother. "I'm the evil one, in case you haven't figured it out."
"I wanted your name, not your calling."
"Being a bastard's more of a compulsion, really. And it's Zsadist. I am Zsadist.
J.R. Ward
#27. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
John Dos Passos
#28. Many people give out of obligation and compulsion, which leads to resentment.
Henry Cloud
#29. One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity.
Rem Koolhaas
#30. Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery.
Betty Friedan
#31. in the Quran, chapter 2, verse 256 that states: "There is no compulsion in religion -- the right way is indeed clearly distinct from error. So whoever disbelieves in the devil and believes in God, he indeed lays hold on the firmest handle which shall never break. And God is Hearing, Knowing.
Angela Walden
#32. Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
#33. The biggest problem with working at a treadmill desk: the compulsion to announce constantly that you are working at a treadmill desk.
Susan Orlean
#34. A tight pace has nothing to do with explosions or car chases. It has everything to do with creating a compulsion to keep on reading, even when your reader has other things she really ought to be doing.
Libbie Hawker
#35. How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.
Karl Rahner
#36. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
Patti Smith
#37. It's hard to go out in front of people with an acoustic guitar and improvise for 30 or 40 minutes, but I had a compulsion to do it. I just had to in a way that I can't really explain.
Bill Orcutt
#38. Compulsion, guilt, pick your poison.' Meaty shrugged. 'You make a better nurse than a patient.
Cassie Alexander
#39. Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.
Mary Stewart
#40. The State is not, as many political scientists would make it, an inanimate thing; it consists of people, human beings, each of whom operates under an inner compulsion to get the most out of life with the least expenditure of labor.
Frank Chodorov
#41. Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.
Soren Kierkegaard
#42. Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?
Charles Dickens
#43. A spirit, breathing the language of independence, is natural to Englishmen, few of whom are disposed to brook compulsion, or submit to the dictates of others, when not softened by reason, or tempered with kindness.
Joseph Lancaster
#45. The unconscious compulsion to enhance one's identity through association with an object is built into the very structure of the egoic mind.
Eckhart Tolle
#46. Myself, I've always been organized in waves. For months on end, slowly descending into disorder, I drift with the status quo. Then I wake up one morning with a sudden compulsion to color-code my socks or stack them vertically.
Diane Ackerman
#47. The compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.
Lorrie Moore
#48. I write to please myself - of course, that is a given. But beyond this reach for pleasure, I know that I write for my countrymen, that they may be lifted from apathy and ignorance. I write because of a compulsion to make something out of the nothing that is my own life.
F. Sionil Jose
#49. A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#50. At its best, this is my calling. At its worst, it is a mad compulsion that I just can't shake.
Zoe Klein
#51. I make music and I can't stop. It's a compulsion and an obsession and a curse.
Juliana Hatfield
#52. Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion.
Sylvia Nasar
#53. The poet, like the lover, is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so.
Babette Deutsch
#54. That much he understood now - the compulsion born of secrecy, how silence was its own sort of prison. The relief that came with being able to tell someone, anyone, all those things you were supposed to keep locked up.
Kit Rocha
#55. Maybe compassion is compulsion, creativity is insanity. If this is so, then is craziness a good thing, the source of our humanity?
Rosie O'Donnell
#56. The inexorable compulsion of all things is towards health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live.
James Stephens
#57. When God works in us, the will, being changed and sweetly breathed upon by the Spirit of God, desires and acts, not from compulsion, but responsively.
Martin Luther
#58. Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad's survival, as in that of Stalin's nation. If the city's inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given
Max Hastings
#59. Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.
Amanda Hocking
#60. "I pay my taxes," says somebody, as if that were an act of virtue instead of one of compulsion.
Robert Menzies
#61. Sometimes it's even hard to tell the difference between a tic and a compulsion. But while tics stem from an urge in a specific part of the body - either completely unconsciously or through a premonitory sensation that's satisfied only by the tic - OCD bubbles up as conscious thoughts in the mind.
Tim Howard
#62. What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.
Patti Smith
#63. When someone is suffering, there is a deep, visceral reaction in the core of our being, a flood of empathy and a frightfully desperate compulsion to give aid.
Bryant McGill
#64. Those who have racked their brains to discover new proofs have perhaps been induced to do so by a compulsion they could not quite explain to themselves. Instead of giving us their new proofs they should have explained to us the motivation that constrained them to search for them.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#65. I like to control my environment, because I feel if I have my physical space in order, then I'm free to dream. So there is some compulsion involved. But the dividend I get is the freedom to be totally disorderly in my dreamworld.
George Carlin
#66. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it.
Pete Seeger
#67. There is still an overwhelming social compulsion-an insanity of consensus, if you will-to get rich from life rather than live richly, to "do well" in the world instead of living well.
Rolf Potts
#68. What impels every man to the utmost exertion in the service of his fellow man. Is, in the market not compulsion on the part of gendarmes, hangmen and penal courts, it is self interest.
Ludwig Von Mises
#69. That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like 'I'm happy! I swear!' I'm not buying it.
Nate Lowman
#72. It's a compulsion. I'm always changing parts of me. Even when I was young, I wanted to change my hair color. I was so determined that I dyed my hair with Kool-Aid.
Rachel McAdams
#73. Unbelievable," I said. "First you wanted to hide her away to keep you alive. Now you actually want her out in the world to use her compulsion for your own psycho plans.
Richelle Mead
#74. I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.
Alan Alda
#75. Some people like to bitch, Rose said. Bitching is OK. But for me, I choose a kind of joy
a lucid compulsion
a polemical kind of fuck-you-motherfucker joy.
Tom Spanbauer
#76. It is necessity and not pleasure that compels us.
[Italian: Necessita c'induce, e non diletto.]
Dante Alighieri
#77. It's always somebody's fault - I blame you for my helpless love - do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me ...
John Geddes
#78. They who cannot be induced to fear for love will never be enforced to love for fear. Love opens the heart, fear shuts it; that encourages, this compels; and victory meets encouragement, but flees compulsion.
Francis Quarles
#79. The most elementary experience of life proves that the effects of compulsion last exactly as long as the physical or moral club can be applied.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#80. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
C.S. Lewis
#81. The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living.
Walter Rauschenbusch
#82. But the people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood.
Martina Boone
#83. A shivery, delicious Southern Gothic with feuding families, dark spirits, ancient curses and caught up in the middle, a young girl learning to live and love for the first time. Atmospheric and suspenseful, Compulsion will draw you in and hold you until the very last page.
Leah Cypess
#84. Make love an another human compulsion and you will fortify its limitation. Acquire it like knowledge and you will understand everything
Ashutosh Gupta
#85. Nothing is compulsory. Free will is paramount. But free will comes with the burden of consequences.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#86. Writing is work, but it's also a compulsion, and once you get your characters on paper, you can't abandon them. You have to respond to them.
Rosamunde Pilcher
#87. Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.
Emma Goldman
#88. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
Albert Schweitzer
#89. As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.
Will Shortz
#90. I write for the same reason I eat chocolate - because it is, undeniably a compulsion.
Emma Shortt
#91. I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
Jonathan Dee
#92. I've been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can't really say where the desire came from; I've always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down!
J.K. Rowling
#93. To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.
David Adam
#94. The compulsion to include everything, leaving nothing out, does not prove that one has unlimited information; it proves that one lacks discrimination.
Sharon Aaronson
#95. There is only one relief for great sufferings, and that is to endure and surrender to their compulsion.
Seneca.
#96. I'm uncomfortable when I'm comfortable. I have to start something new-in the agency or in my personal life-every two years or so. Taking risks gives me energy. I can't help it, it's my personality. I'd like to think it's not really a compulsion toward high risks, but the spirit of an entrepreneur.
Jay Chiat
#97. It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?
Victoria Woodhull
#98. Government has ceased to mean upholding and reinforcing the traditional rights and morals of the governed; it now means compulsion in the service of social engineering.
Joseph Sobran
#99. Don't make me hunt you, Princess," Ryodan warns softly. "You'll become my sole target, my obsession, my compulsion, my undying homicidal fantasy, the object of my every fucking thought and inclination, and the more time I have to contemplate what I'm going to do to you when I find you -
Karen Marie Moning
#100. Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
Aristotle.
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