Impulse Quotes - Page 36

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

  Helene Deutsch

  All The Best, Adolescence, Humans

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• If I would put my talent on the table, if I would control my impulses, if I would make decisions and plans for my own life, then I could be successful.

  Star Parker

  Successful, Decision, Tables

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Book, Beer, Names

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.17, Penguin

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• For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.

  DJ Spooky

  Clouds, Records, Mixtapes

  "DJ Spooky’s Icy Philharmonic". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. October 17, 2011.

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• Synthetic or inorganic substances do not contain any 'life force'; they are not dynamic. Everything is made of chemicals, but organic substances like essential oils have a structure which only mother nature can put together. They have a life force, an additional impulse which can only be found in living things.

  Robert Tisserand

  Mother, Oil, Together

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• I believe the people should have the opportunity to have a greater influence on politics with their ideas. We need a new impulse for renewal.

  Martin Schulz

  Believe, Opportunity, Should Have

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• Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.

  George P. Baker

  Immature, Humans, Felt

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• My activism is a result of my love. So whether it's trying to preserve the wilderness in Southern Utah or writing about an erotics of place, it is that same impulse - to try to make sense of the world, to try to preserve something that is beautiful, to ask the tough questions, the push the boundaries of what is acceptable.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Beautiful, Writing, Southern Utah

  Terry Tempest Williams (2006). “A voice in the wilderness: conversations with Terry Tempest Williams”, Utah State Univ Pr

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• Time is your friend, impulse is your enemy. Take advantage of compound interest and don't be captivated by the siren song of the market.

  Warren Buffett

  Song, Enemy, Sirens

  Source: time.com

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• As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Communication, Home, Voice

  Interview with Sarah Fay, staging.believermag.com. March 2007.

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• The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Thinking, Justice

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.22, HarperCollins UK

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• I'm not an impulse shopper. I will wait three days after I see something. Am I still thinking about it? Then I'll get it.

  Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann

  Thinking, Waiting, Three

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