Impulse Quotes

• A lonely impulse of delight

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • Lonely
  • Delight
  • Contentment

• The point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.

  

  Thomas Nagel
  • World
  • Passion
  • Madness

• All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

  

  Paul Auster
  • Writing
  • Impulse

• Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.

  

  Rudolf Arnheim
  • Survival
  • Order
  • Evolution

• I usually cast myself in things because acting is how I best relate to artistic impulses. It's what I've wanted to do since I was a child, so a scene usually plays itself out in my head with me performing it. And if I cast myself that's one less person I have to pay, one less person I have to explain my vision to, one less person I have to worry about.

  

  Amber Sealey
  • Children
  • Worry
  • Vision

• If you want to be creative, don't try to do something new. Doing something new means NOT doing what's been done before, and that's a negative impulse. Negative impulses are frustrating. They're the opposite of creativity, and they never yield good ideas.

  

  Eva Zeisel
  • Creative
  • Impulse
  • Good Ideas

• There is a deep and corrosive tribal impulse to act as if "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is just a jackass.

  

  Benjamin E. Sasse
  • Enemy
  • Impulse
  • My Friend

• When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.

  

  Joseph Heller
  • Heaven
  • Angel
  • Tragedy

• To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.

  

  Eva Zeisel
  • Creation
  • Motive
  • Frustrating

• One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

  

  Helen Keller
  • Impulse
  • Consent

• I didn't think anything I wrote was going to get published. I'm a dyslexic kid who had tutors through college. But I had a very strong impulse to write.

  

  Isabel Gillies
  • Write
  • Impulse
  • Dyslexic

• We proceed by doubt, by trial and error, by resisting the impulse to lunge after certainty.

  

  William Deresiewicz
  • Certainty
  • Trial
  • Resisting

• The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

  

  Seamus Heaney
  • Writing
  • Impulse

• Short story characters, mine anyway, are usually driven by impulse, not so much by their histories and the choices that they have to make.

  

  Charles Baxter
  • Character
  • Choices
  • Stories

• Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

  

  Seamus Heaney
  • Language
  • Secure
  • Bolts

• Bu is a word that cools many a warm impulse, stifles many a kindly thought, puts a dead stop to many a brotherly deed. No one would ever love his neighbor as himself if he listened to all the Buts that could be said.

  

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
  • Love
  • Stop
  • Neighbor

• Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.

  

  George Eliot
  • Thoughts
  • Inspiration
  • Process

• Though helping is a common social process, it is not the only social process. Our relationships with others have many other functions. In order to offer, give, and receive help effectively, we also need the ability to shift from whatever else we were doing and adopt a readiness to help or be helped. It is part of our social training to be prepared to help and to offer help when the ongoing situation suddenly makes helping an imperative or at least an option. But this impulse to help or seek help can run counter to what else is going on.

  

  Edgar Schein
  • Help
  • Process
  • Social

• Perpetual spring, the flare of adventure in the blood, the impulse of men who packed Virgil with their bean-bags on the overland journey, conspired~ to make San Francisco a city of artists.

  

  William Henry Irwin
  • Journey
  • Spring
  • Adventure

• Great things do not just happen by impulse, but as a succession of small things linked together.

  

  Vincent Van Gogh
  • Together
  • Impulse
  • Succession

• I have a strong impulse to protect history and time and the lineage of events.

  

  Ariel Pink
  • Time
  • History
  • Strong

• The heart sometimes leaps forward when the head tells us to be still. When this happens, patience is clearly called for as we seek to find a proper balance between impulse and discretion.

  

  Alexander Clark
  • Heart
  • Wisdom
  • Sometimes

• That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

  

  Judith Wright
  • Love
  • Poetry
  • Impulse

• Vanity as an impulse has without doubt been of far more benefit to civilization than modesty has ever been.

  

  William E. Woodward
  • Civilization
  • Benefits
  • Modesty

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