Compulsion Quotes - Page 15

• A story has to be a good date, because the reader can stop at any time. Remember, readers are selfish and have no compulsion to be decent about anything.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Selfish, Stories, Remember

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• Marx.... Lenin.... Mao Tse-Tung.... These men were animated by the love of brother and this we must believe though their ends meant the seizure of power, and the building of mighty armies, the compulsion of concentration camps, the forced labor and torture and killing of tens of thousands, even millions.

  Dorothy Day

  Brother, Believe, Army

  "The Incompatibility of Love and Violence". "Catholic Worker", May 1951.

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• It's among the intelligentsia that we often find the glib compulsion to explain everything and to understand nothing.

  Joost Meerloo

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• If I feel like crying, I'll just cry in a dream. Something I really try not to do in my waking hours. I like good melodrama because it's just an undumping of all these compulsions we feel that we work so hard to master during our waking hours. No wonder we crash to sleep in bed at night. We have to, otherwise we'd just spend our waking hours shredding the feelings from everybody else.

  Guy Maddin

  Dream, Sleep, Night

  Source: thequietus.com

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• ... human free will implies God's prior decision not to tamper with the metaphysical base of that free will. It also implies man's ability to reject the persuasion God uses to influence that free will while leaving its metaphysical base intact! Persuasion, not compulsion, is what even He must rely upon! And persuasion, by its very definition, must be resistible!

  Don Richardson

  Men, Rely Upon, Decision

  Don Richardson (1984). “Eternity in Their Hearts”, Baker Publishing Group

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• Among the many things that profoundly impress me about the Dalai Lama, quite high up on the list is his ability to say "I don't know". I've often wished that other people in prominent positions wouldn't feel the compulsion to have an answer for everything and would feel equally free to say "I don't know." It's a sign of wisdom to know that you don't know and a sign of stupidity to think that you know everything. I admire it enormously in him, and wonder why so few people in leading positions reach that stage.

  David Steindl-Rast

  Thinking, People, Stupidity

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• Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

  Rod Serling

  Writing, Knows, Massive

  Source: www.rodserling.com

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• I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Answers, Knows

  Paul Auster, James M. Hutchisson (2013). “Conversations with Paul Auster”, p.200, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• For many people it's Facebook, or sports on TV, whatever it is. I have my own demons that I battle. But whatever they are, you wish you could not do them. For most of us it's "I cannot get off Facebook." But imagine that your demon has you living on the street. I don't think those compulsions and obsessions are that different.

  Jess Walter

  Sports, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's just a compulsion to create something new and stay busy. I don't know how to do anything else. It was never exactly right. Those records came out in spite of their flaws. And because of their flaws they were good.

  Stephen Malkmus

  Records, Busy, Flaws

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I tend to work most often from the method of ignoring any ritualistic writing for long periods of time, and then I'll spend three straight weeks writing for 12 hours a day and just going through the motions with my worldly business because the compulsion to write descends upon me like a kind of madness. I don't mean to be dramatic, but it feels that way when it strikes.

  Kevin Keck

  Writing, Mean, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Guitar, People, Way

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Although Grandma's passion had led me to the power of food, not all of her recipes were healthy. I kept her gusto and the love that she put into her cuisine but ditched the ingredients that bought her a one-way ticket to arthritis, diverticulitis and a host of other inflammatory conditions. I also ditched my own addictions and compulsions around food, especially sugar.

  Kris Carr

  Grandma, Passion, Addiction

  "Love, Eat, Heal" by Kris Carr, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 22, 2012.

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• I think that I am a compulsive person, but now I'm learning to put those compulsions into healthy things.

  Michelle Pfeiffer

  Thinking, Healthy, Persons

  "New Again: Michelle Pfeiffer". Interview With Colleen Kelsey, Peter Stone, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 9, 2012.

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• Even after The Kite Runner was published I continued to practice for another eighteen months. But I had always had a love of writing and a compulsion to do it.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Writing, Practice, Kites

  "GeekDad Interview: Khaled Hosseini, Author of The Kite Runner". Interview with Tony Sims, www.wired.com. September 30, 2011.

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• I think it's in our nature to try to get beyond that next horizon. I think that when we as a species are scratching that itch we're actually following an evolutionary compulsion that is wired into us. I think good things come of it. That's the philosophical side.

  Ron Howard

  Philosophical, Thinking, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I really love James Joyce, Dubliners and other work. And I was interested in the way the dash was used in English topography - in his work particularly - and I realized there was no compulsion to use those ugly dot-dot curlicues all over the place to designate dialogue. I began to look around, and found writers who could make transitions quite clear by the language itself. I'm a bit of a maverick now. I'm always trying to push the medium.

  John Edgar Wideman

  Always Trying, Topography, Transition

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It was just a compulsion. In fact, I soon realized that the only thing I really enjoyed was the actual snorting.

  George Carlin

  Facts, Enjoyed

  Source: reprints.longform.org

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• The dividend I get [from my compulsion] is the freedom to be totally disorderly in my dreamworld.

  George Carlin

  Dividends

  Source: reprints.longform.org

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• I think I'm a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don't struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don't feel a compulsion to write.

  Wole Soyinka

  Struggle, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.nobelprize.org

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• Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Inspirational, Obsession, Impulse

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• In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the 'image' of God.

  Adolf Hitler

  Religious, Lying, Humanity

  Adolf Hitler (1998). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  War, Heart, Character

  Charles Dickens (1868). “Charles Dickens's works. Charles Dickens ed. [18 vols. of a 21 vol. set. Wanting A child's history of England; Christmas stories; The mystery of Edwin Drood].”, p.301

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• Do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement.

  Plato

  Leadership, Sports, Use

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• Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Mean, Government, Law

  Ludwig Von Mises (1990). “Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays”

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