a compulsion QUOTES

1 " The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street. "

― James Jones

2 " You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch. "

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3 " During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––" sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience). "

4 " Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.
Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? "

― Milan Kundera , Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

5 " When choosing a life partner, do not leave anything to chance. If a young girl gets pregnant for you, it is not enough reason to marry her. You should take responsibility and care for the young child and mum as far as you can, but, that shouldn't be a compulsion towards matrimony! If you are the lady, you must decide if you would ordinarily marry this young man if there were no pregnancies. If no, move on.

When choosing a life partner, look as far into the future as you can and see what is required in the goal you have chosen to pursue and get someone who is as hungry and as interested in those goals as you.

When choosing a life partner, LEAVE NOTHING TO DOUBT AND CHANCE. "

― Magnus Nwagu Amudi

6 " The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm. "

― Ken Robinson , The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

7 " Emma felt a compulsion to run her hands through it. To step into his arms and never leave. Desire shot to her knickers and an aching throb began between her thighs Shit, I didn’t come here for this. "

8 " I should stitch my mouth shut. Honesty is a compulsion that’s damned me more than once. But I just can’t hold it in anymore. The words build and explode out of me like an uncontainable sneeze. "

― Isaac Marion , Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1)

9 " People who are not fully enlightened have no business becoming parents. This contradicts the conventionally accepted notion that people have an inherent " right" to have children. They do not. People who have a compulsion to traumatize a child, even in the mildest forms, are breaking the child's human rights, though of course the parental compulsion to find false pleasure through procreation obliterates their awareness of these rights. But interestingly, many parents would agree that convicted pedophiles and child murderers have no right to procreate, because of the dynamics in which they are so likely to engage. "

10 " Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving ('I want this," don't want' that" ), you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance. Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. As with understanding anguish, the challenge in letting go of craving is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us. "

11 " You can only be in a state of non-reaction if you can recognize someone's behavior as coming from the ego, as being an expression of the collective human dysfunction. When you realize it's not personal, there is no longer a compulsion to react as if it were. "

― Eckhart Tolle , A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

12 " To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. "

― , The Man Who Couldn't Stop

13 " It is so unkind--' 'Perhaps. But sometimes a compulsion comes over one to speak the truth! "

― Agatha Christie , Hercule Poirot's Christmas (Hercule Poirot, #18)

14 " Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing out of Europe and landing on our shores.
— Teller: A Novel "

― Frederick Weisel

15 " We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. "

16 " You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. "