Top 100 The Impulse Quotes
#1. There are certain things that our age needs. It needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness.
Bertrand Russell
#2. The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him; and all the time we are pursuing Him we are already in His hand: Thy right hand has upheld me.
A.W. Tozer
#3. Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.
Kurt Vonnegut
#4. When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
Dave Eggers
#5. The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Barnett Newman
#6. When you have an idea, a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not tell people and that's almost always a mistake.
Reid Hoffman
#7. One of the first times that I went into a book store and saw a bunch of my books, my impulse was to put them all under my coat and run away so that no one else could see them, even though, of course, I wanted everyone to see them.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#8. It is the - actually profoundly unartistic - impulse to produce exterior likeness rather than inner truth: the same impulse as naturalistic photograpy and the copy.
Joseph Roth
#9. Often, the more reliably you perform a task, the less likely it is for someone to notice that you're doing it and to feel grateful and to feel any impulse to help or to take a turn.
Gretchen Rubin
#10. It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.
Leo Tolstoy
#11. Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#12. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness.
Kelly McGonigal
#13. Today the impulse towards interdependence is immeasurably greater. We are witnessing the beginnings of a new doctrine of international community
Tony Blair
#14. You're a Capricorn to the core. Organized, loves structure, not driven by impulse, a master of restraint.
James Patterson
#15. I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don't always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun.
Claes Oldenburg
#16. Mastery of impulse is achieved through taking pauses during life's contrasting situations. Mastery of impulse is about developing strong willpower that can be used to redirect the flow of energy in any situation. Mastery of impulse is about responding to the world with a sense of reason and peace.
Alaric Hutchinson
#17. My first impulse is not to grab her or kiss her or yell at her. I simple want to touch her cheek, still flushed from the night's performance. I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet-not miles, not continents, not years-and to take a callused finger to her face.
Gayle Forman
#18. He pulled out his personal journal and pen. Jess understood the impulse, all too well, to spill out the bile and hurt into ink, where no one could see it. He
Rachel Caine
#19. The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected.
Algernon Blackwood
#20. Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
Matthew Arnold
#21. The true critic is he who bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure.
Oscar Wilde
#22. The country is filled with energetic and enterprising men, rendered desperate by being reduced from affluence to poverty through the vicissitudes of the times. They will give an impulse to smuggling unknown to the country heretofore.
John C. Calhoun
#23. He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
John Steinbeck
#24. For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life.
Michael Leunig
#25. The teacher, like the artist and the philosopher, can perform his work adequately only if he feels himself to be an individual directed by an inner creative impulse, not dominated and fettered by an outside authority.
Bertrand Russell
#26. I teach a course called 'Committed Impulse,' and part of the work I do is to get people outside of their heads.
Josh Pais
#27. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. - Annie Dillard
Austin Kleon
#28. Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.
George Pierce Baker
#29. Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to denumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.
Ida Tarbell
#30. I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.
William Gibson
#31. How he loathed his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. "It's the clock that is the nay-sayer to life," he thought
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#32. In another place was a vast array of idols - Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
#33. The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
Daniel Bell
#34. It was not impulse.
It was not lust.
It was not wrath, or boredom, or desperation.
People remembered the saints because they had their tokens.
Pam Jones
#35. And if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
(from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan
#36. Collective achievement, of course, is less appealing both to the participants and to those later reading about it as the human impulse is to look for the heroes and villains.
Matthew Restall
#37. When I'd originally loaded the car and held the door open for him, I'd had a passing impulse to pick him up bodily and insert him gently through the open window.
J.D. Salinger
#38. Love: I recognize the emotion for what it is, an irrational self-destructive impulse, which is disguised as joy.
Nikola Tesla
#39. If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas ...
Eva Zeisel
#40. The real magic is in making the intangible idea, the creative impulse, manifest and live in our reality.
Mark Ryan
#41. I was stunned by the unexpected electricity that flowed through me, amazed that it was possible to be more aware of him than I already was. A crazy impulse to reach over and touch him, to stroke his perfect face just once in the darkness, nearly overwhelmed me.
-Bella
Stephenie Meyer
#42. Physical pain is not a simple affair of an impulse, travelling at a fixed rate along a nerve. It is the resultant of a conflict between a stimulus and the whole individual.
Rene Leriche
#43. The Indian who fells the tree that he may gather the fruit, and the Arab who plunders the caravans of commerce are actuated by the same impulse of savage nature, and relinquish for momentary rapine the long and secure possession of the most important blessings.
Edward Gibbon
#44. Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.
John F. Kennedy
#45. The impulse to perform a worthy action often springs from our best nature, but is afterwards tainted by the spur of selfishness or sinister interest.
Emile Souvestre
#46. The great thing about having digital comics is that it is like having a comic-book shop on your digital device. It has turned comics from a destination buy to an impulse buy.
Jim Lee
#47. Perseverance is the master impulse of the firmest souls, the discipline of the noblest virtues, and the guaranty of acquisitions the most invigorating in their use and inestimable in their worth.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#48. There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.
Henry James
#49. Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.
John Berger
#50. I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.
Dylan Thomas
#51. If I did have the impulse to be a parent, I would adopt - or foster.
Rupert Everett
#52. [Patriotism] is in itself a kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#53. A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life
Honore De Balzac
#54. Films exhaust me, they do, and I often want nothing more to do with them, but I'm continually surprised at the resurgence of the impulse to come back and do it all over again.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#55. Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag
#56. It's important to control yourself because life gets too complicated if you don't, but the impulse is often there for people. Some say society should be more open. That doesn't work either.
Woody Allen
#57. Sometimes there are two very opposite directions, and we go with the stronger one at the end. It's an impulse thing, like, 'Oh, I love both so much, but it's got to be one or the other because the two don't work together.'
Marc Jacobs
#58. Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to do ...
Ursula K. Le Guin
#59. If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experiences, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know that a god is a powerful impulse in my soul, at once I must concern myself with him, for then he can become important
Carl Jung
#61. The impulse to share anything is a new one, the impulse to hide as natural as breathing
Veronica Roth
#62. I'm a great believer in everything at the right time. Go on a crazy spree if it's the right time to do it but choose your moment carefully and beware of impulse buying.
Lemar
#63. Aren't we grateful for our brains, that can take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy and use it to explore our world? Aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations, in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and beauty of nature?
Louis Schwartzberg
#64. Whenever a few people are gathered with a spiritual impulse to connect, to resonate through the heart, to make a shift from their own ego to their essence, and then to connect to do whatever work in the world they are called to do, that's an evolutionary circle.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#65. One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.
Stanley Cavell
#66. But there's something about sitting at someone else's desk that makes you feel like looking in the drawers. I resisted the impulse briefly. Then I decided what the hell. I was a private investigator. Poking my nose in where it didn't belong came with the territory.
Stephen R. Donaldson
#67. As we continue to look for "developmental deficiencies" in our maturation in Christ, how are you doing in the area of contentment? How quick is your impulse to find satisfaction in Christ, to go to the joy of the gospel in times of stress, frustration, disappointment, and trouble?
Matt Chandler
#68. This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.
Allan Bloom
#69. One becomes more interested in a job of work after the first impulse to drop it has been overcome.
Fulton J. Sheen
#70. We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us.
James Ramsey Ullman
#71. The impulse for much writing is homesickness. You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness.
Joan Didion
#72. Never follow any impulse to teach, however strong it might be. The command to teach is not felt as an impulsion.
Idries Shah
#73. Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.
Phillips Brooks
#74. I find that when people haven't found God and do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not on them, yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something. If they're not educated they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around. If they are educated they write poetry.
A.W. Tozer
#75. The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.
Angus Wilson
#76. If you had only truth, goodness, and harmony on your side, and the complete absence of the other, there would be no creative impulse.
Deepak Chopra
#77. I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you.
Woody Allen
#78. The need to call this thing "good" and this thing "bad," this thing "white" and this thing "black," was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.
Yaa Gyasi
#79. There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.
Audrey Niffenegger
#80. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
Annie Dillard
#81. The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
#82. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
William Faulkner
#83. I felt an old, visceral insecurity that manifested itself in an impulse to cover up our cribbage game, to literally shield the board with my hands.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#84. I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.
Barbara Hepworth
#85. Excuse me, your attention please."
He waited until the whole floor had stopped what it was doing and turned to face him. For a split second his impulse control kicked in, but by then his mouth was fully engaged.
"For the record, Claire Marsden and I are not having sex.
Sarah Mayberry
#86. The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.
Charles Murray
#87. Poor, successful, fallible Republican party! If it could only have kept the purity of the patriot impulse of which it was born!
Candace Wheeler
#88. But china is seldom thrown from a great height; it is one of the rarest of human actions. You have to find in conjunction a very high house, and a woman of such reckless impulse and passionate prejudice that she flings her jar or pot straight from the window without thought of who is below.
Virginia Woolf
#89. Getting annoyed with his inability to make a decision, I fight the impulse to walk out by reminding myself of my end-goal.
Ella Dominguez
#90. You are entitled to know that two entities occupy your body. One of these entities is motivated by and responds to the impulse of fear. The other is motivated by and responds to the impulse of faith. Will you be guided by faith or will you allow fear to overtake you?
Napoleon Hill
#91. Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.
Saul Bass
#92. Custom is a shroud that conceals everything. Not without first encountering the uncustomary will we be able to recognize what is customary and, more importantly, to change it. Such is the impulse behind our conversation with the vampryoteuthis
Vilem Flusser
#93. So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
Joan Didion
#94. There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
G.K. Chesterton
#96. Love is the sole impulse for creation; and the man who does not have it as the greatest incentive in his life has never developed the real creative instinct. No one can swing out into the Universal without love, for the whole universe is based upon it.
Ernest Holmes
#97. Christ had given the apostles a world-wide commission, embracing all the nations; but intellectually they did not understand what He meant. They found that out as they followed the impulse of the Spirit.
Roland Allen
#98. Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody ... as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.
Annie Lennox
#99. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
#100. The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.
Joseph Wood Krutch
