Impulse Quotes - Page 35

• Experience is primarily the ability to restrain our fleeting impulses.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Fleeting, Ability

  "Day Watch". Book by Sergei Lukyanenko, Vladimir Vasilyev, 2000.

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• According to the first image of international relations, the locus of the important causes of war is found in the nature and behavior of man. Wars result from selfishness, from misdirected aggressive impulses, from stupidity.

  Kenneth Waltz

  War, Men, Stupidity

  Kenneth N. Waltz (2010). “Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis”, p.16, Columbia University Press

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• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

  Susan McClary

  Symphony, Musical, Enlightenment

  "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality". Book by Susan McClary, 1991.

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• To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.

  Ellen Willis

  Self, Expression, Erotic

  "Historical Analysis". "Dissent", Winter 2005.

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• What is the relationship between spirituality and ethical practice? Since love and compassion and similar qualities all, by definition, presume some level of concern for others' well-being, they presume ethical restraint. We cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.

  Dalai Lama

  Compassion, Practice, Concern For Others

  The Dalai Lama (2012). “The Essence Of Wisdom”, p.10, Hachette UK

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• Sexual integrity means honestly recognizing our own impulses and desires and honoring them, whether or not we choose to act on them. If we value integrity, we must also value diversity in sexual expression and orientation, recognizing that there is no one truth, or one way, that fits everyone.Sexuality is sacred because through it we make a connection with another self - but it is misused and perverted when it becomes an arena of power-over, a means of treating another - or oneself - as an object.

  Starhawk

  Integrity, Mean, Self

  Starhawk (2012). “Dreaming the Dark”, p.69, Beacon Press

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• Here's a news flash--writers are selfish people. Truth is, creative types like me are driven by one impulse--to make up a world in which we get to control everything and everyone. We decide who enters and who exits, what the weather will be, who will hook up with whom, who will win and who will lose. It makes us feel powerful and, in all honesty, has relatively little to do with thinking about what will make anyone else happy.

  Victoria Laurie

  Honesty, Powerful, Selfish

  Victoria Laurie (2007). “What's A Ghoul to Do?: A Ghost Hunter Mystery”, p.7, Penguin

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• All the best human impulses can be traced back to adolescence.

  Helene Deutsch

  All The Best, Adolescence, Humans

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• Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.

  Mary Stewart

  Past, Thinking, Sometimes

  Mary Stewart (1961). “The Ivy Tree”

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• The idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.

  Margaret Halsey

  Art, Creativity, Dedication

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• The impulse of humanity toward social progress is like the movement in the currents of a great water system, from myriad sources and under myriad circumstances and conditions, beating onward, ever onward toward its eternity, the Ocean.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Ocean, Water, Humanity

  Anna Julia Cooper, Charles C. Lemert, Esme Bhan (1998). “The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters”, p.339, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community.

  Barbara Deming

  Self, Masculine And Feminine, Two

  Barbara Deming (1974). “We cannot live without our lives”

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• In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn't about Sept. 11. It's about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies - or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers - and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

  Manohla Dargis

  Baby, Loneliness, Sadness

  "A Youngster With a Key, a Word and a Quest" by Manohla Dargis, www.nytimes.com. December 22, 2011.

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• It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Religious, Void, Belief

  Shirley Hazzard (1991). “Countenance of truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim case”, Vintage

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• Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

  Storm Jameson

  Wall, Humanity, Language

  Storm Jameson (2011). “Parthian Words”, p.24, A&C Black

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• Definite gifts render their possessors capable of overcoming any obstacle this side of death; they create an impetus of far more genuine value than external advantages in some other career where the impulse to make use of them remains weak or non-existent. The work that one enjoys is the greatest source of happiness and vitality in life.

  Vera Brittain

  Work, Passion, Careers

  Vera Brittain (1947). “On becoming a writer”

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• Poor, successful, fallible Republican party! If it could only have kept the purity of the patriot impulse of which it was born!

  Candace Wheeler

  Party, Successful, Political

  Candace Wheeler (1918). “Yesterdays in a Busy Life”

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• Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down. ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Animal, Trying, Different

  Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces”, p.207, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Girl, Men, Careers

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• My life has not been the best possible. The slave of impulse, I have rushed forward to my own destruction.

  Lady Caroline Lamb

  Life, Slave, Destruction

  Lady Caroline Lamb (2009). “The works of Lady Caroline Lamb”

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• There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

  Stephanie Zacharek

  Drama, Character, Epic

  "'There Will Be Blood'". www.salon.com. December 26, 2007.

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• Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work -- the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.

  Vance Palmer

  Cities, Giving, Creative

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• 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

  Ambition, Mean, Democratic Ideals

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• So long as men are compassionate to such a degree that they cannot hear a fly struggling in a spider's web without emotion it can never be reasonably maintained that it is their natural impulse to wound and kill the dumb animals, or to butcher one another in what is called the field of honour.

  John Newton

  Struggle, Animal, Men

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• Out of the freedom from worry that God's generosity provides comes an impulse toward simplicity rather than accumulation.

  John Piper

  Worry, Generosity, Simplicity

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