Compulsion Quotes - Page 5

• 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

  Powerful, Knowledge, Men

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• Every morning, I shall concern myself anew about the boundary, Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No, And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid, Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion, To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.

  Martin Buber

  Life, Morning, Reality

  "Power and Love". Poem by Martin Buber, 1926.

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• Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of compulsion.
  Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

  Erich Fromm

  Life, Fall, Passion

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Art of Loving”, p.29, Open Road Media

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  Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Occupation, Jazz

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• 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

  Thinking, Government, Organization

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• To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Memories, Past, Giving

  Eckhart Tolle (2001). “Practicing the Power of Now: Essential Teachings, Meditations, and Exercises from the Power of Now”, p.31, New World Library

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• To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Memories, Ego, Mind

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.48, New World Library

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• The man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Life, Men, Thinking

  Albert Schweitzer (2015). “The Light Within Us”, p.31, Open Road Media

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• We do not assert that the capitalist mode of economic calculation guarantees the absolutely best solution of the allocation of factors of production. Such absolutely perfect solutions of any problem are out of reach of mortal men. What the operation of a market not sabotaged by the interference of compulsion and coercion can bring about is merely the best solution accessible to the human mind under the given state of technological knowledge and the intellectual abilities of the age's shrewdest men.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Perfect, Mind

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• Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.

  Albert Einstein

  Albert Einstein (2011). “The World As I See It”, p.13, Open Road Media

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• The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. 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.

  Eric Metaxas

  Ties, Church, Speak

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• 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

  Writing, Speaks Out, Tasks

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• Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity, are both uncivilized and undemocratic

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Views, Patriotism, Democracy

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• Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Art, Years, Letters

  Letter declining Pulitzer Prize in fiction (1926)

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• If we can implant in our people the Christian virtues which we sum up in the word character, and, at the same time, give them a knowledge of the line which should be drawn between voluntary action and governmental compulsion in a democracy, and of what can be accomplished within the stern laws of economics, we will enable them to retain their freedom, and at the same time, make them worthy to be free.

  Winthrop W. Aldrich

  Christian, Freedom, Character

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• Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

  Aristotle

  Nature, Causes, Chance

  Aristotle (2016). “Rhetoric”, p.54, Aristotle

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• TO THOSE WHO WOULD USE INTELLIGENCE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DEATH - TO STRENGTHEN THE WILL TO LIVE AGAINST THE WISH TO DIE, AND TO REPLACE WITH LOVE THE BLIND COMPULSION TO GIVE HOSTAGES TO HATRED AS THE PRICE OF LIVING.

  Karl A. Menninger

  Life, Wish To Die, Giving

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• 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

  Wise, Wisdom, Men

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• The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

  Eric Hoffer

  Creativity, Self, Creative

  "Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'". The New York Times Magazine, p. 52, April 25, 1971.

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• 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

  Heart, Men, Shoes

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• Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears.

  Geneen Roth

  Lonely, Lying, Fall

  Geneen Roth (2011). “Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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• And what shall he suffer who slays him who of all men, as they say, is his own best friend? I mean the suicide, who deprives himself by violence of his appointed share of life. Not because the law of the state requires him. Nor yet under the compulsion of some painful and inevitable misfortune which has come upon him. Nor because he has had to suffer from irremediable and intolerable shame, but who from sloth or want of manliness imposes upon himself an unjust penalty.

  Plato

  Suicide, Suicidal, Mean

  Plato (2015). “The Complete Plato”, p.1764, Booklassic

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• Perhaps the greatest discovery of my life, without question the greatest commitment, came when finally I had the confidence in God that I would loan or yield my agency to him-without compulsion or pressure, without any duress, as a single individual alone, by myself, no counterfeiting, nothing expected other than the privilege. In a sense, speaking figuratively, to take one's agency, that precious gift which the scriptures make plain is essential to life itself, and say, "I will do as you direct," is afterward to learn that in so doing you possess it all the more.

  Boyd K. Packer

  Life, Commitment, Yield

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• Society of leisure perhaps? Indeed, the most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labour to leisure. Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon. The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.

  Henri Lefebvre

  Creative, Overcoming, New Horizons

  "Everyday Life in the Modern World".

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• For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.

  C. S. Lewis

  Prayer, Essence, May

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.97, Simon and Schuster

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