Quotes About Compulsions

#1. The free man is not he who defies the rules ... but he who, recognizing the compulsions inherent in his being, seeks rather to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest each day's experience.

Bernard Iddings Bell

#2. A wide distance between the governors and the governed will produce a state that is predatory toward its own citizens, indifferent to their desires, and subject to the inbred whims and compulsions of its ruling class. It will produce crisis. Countering

Christopher L. Hayes

#3. Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires.

William O. Douglas

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

Scott Adams

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

Denis Villeneuve

#6. Technology, under all circumstances, leads to planning; in its higher manifestations it may put the problems of planning beyond the reach of the industrial firm. Technological compulsions, and not ideology or political will, will require the firm to seek the help and protection of the state.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#7. In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#8. If we become aware of its limitations and compulsions, we can transcend them.

B.K.S. Iyengar

#9. How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.

William Faulkner

#10. Compulsions are intricate survival systems that we create because we don't know how to be there for ourselves.

Mary O'Malley

#11. You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible.

Geneen Roth

#12. Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects ... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)

Oliver Sacks

#13. To find love is the great human undertaking ... and it's always complicated by our compulsions and unconscious patterns, to say nothing of issues of trust and control.

Michelle Huneven

#14. Compulsions are not good for the soul.

Gerald G. May

#15. Freedom means the power to act by soul guidance, not by the compulsions of desires and habits. Obeying the ego leads to bondage; obeying the soul brings liberation.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#16. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

Germaine Greer

#17. 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.

Ernest Gellner

#18. Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature ... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these things abut a person, you can touch him at the core of his being.

William Bernbach

#19. For compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are a response to anxiety. Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.

Sharon Begley

#20. Not merely by rules of conduct and religious observances, nor by much learning either, nor even by attainment of concentration, nor by sleeping alone, do I reach the happiness of freedom, to which no worldlings attain. If you have not put an end to compulsions, nurse your faith

Gautama Buddha

#21. Human beings love, despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.

Germaine Greer

#22. The best painting comes out of compulsions and obsessions, out of deep love or hate, out of intellectual or emotional involvement with something that lies outside the painting itself.

Edward Betts

#23. 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.

Hilary Mantel

#24. 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.

Jon Ronson

#25. Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Simone Weil

#26. Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#27. There came a time in everyone's life when they realized that in spite of how hard they'd been running from themselves, everywhere they went, there they were: Addictions and compulsions were nothing but marching bands of distraction, masking truths that were unpleasant, but ultimately undeniable.

J.R. Ward

#28. The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.

John Updike

#29. In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

Orhan Pamuk

#30. 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

Jon Ronson

#31. OCD is an anxiety disorder, one that brings conscious intrusive thoughts and compulsions - 'Touch the bannister. Pick up that rock. You'd better do it, or something terrible will happen.'

Tim Howard

#32. When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten. When the belt fits, the belly is forgotten. When the heart is right, "for" and "against" are forgotten. No drives, no compulsions, no needs, no attractions: Then your affairs are under control. You are a free man.

Zhuangzi

#33. Freedom is not only the absence of external restraints. It is also the absence of irresistible internal compulsions, unmanageable passion, and uncensorable highlights.

George Will

#34. 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).

Rick Warren

#35. Blessed are the ones who have become spiritually "domesticated"; the ones who have tamed the wild animal energy within them, the passions and compulsions of our lower nature.

Cynthia Bourgeault

#36. He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

China Mieville

#37. Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions.

Robert Lane Greene