Compulsion Quotes

“Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”
― Plato, The Republic

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

“I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

“It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“We've lost a lot of years, but you can't lose love. Not real love. It stays locked inside you, ready for whenever you are strong enough to find it again.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.”
― John Milton, The Complete Poetry

“Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
― Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

“The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“But there was a difference between being stuck and choosing to stay. Between being found and finding yourself.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited

“But the people who mattered were the people you chose instead of the people who were yours by an accident of birth. Real family was heart as much as, if not more than, blood.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“Reading is not optional.”
― Walter Dean Myers

“Sometimes, though, we let ourselves get so used to being 'fine' that we lose track of how 'not fine' we are.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“Is there a reason you look like you want to murder me?"
"Not particularly. You have that effect on people.”
― Martina Boone, Compulsion

“Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.”
― Martina Boone

“It is necessity and not pleasure that compels us.
[Italian: Necessita c'induce, e non diletto.]”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“A killer must focus on details, Vanessa.”
― Steve Rush, Lethal Impulse

“The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it.. He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.”
― Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

“It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate.”
― Stephen R. Donaldson, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul

“...she grasped the terrible truth that love can never be compelled, from man, from sprite, from beast; that one who loves, however she longs for requital, however long she waits, may receive in return the reverse of what she gives, the dark side of the moon.”
― Thomas Burnett Swann, The Weirwoods

“The modern West has been deeply split about freedom and responsibility. On the one hand, it has championed human freedom in many forms - human rights, sexual freedom, political liberty, freedom to choose in many spheres. On the other hand, many of its most intelligent members have not believed that people are free at all, and have devoted great efforts to show that really we are the product of our genes, our unconscious drives, our education, economic pressures, or other forms of conditioning.”
― David F. Ford, Theology: A Very Short Introduction

“Writer: It's not an occupation; it's a compulsion.”
― Teresa Nielsen Hayden

“They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.

But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? ‘Without the whip the Negro will not work,’ said the anti-abolitionist. ‘Free from their master’s supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated’, said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question oof sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie.”
― Pyotr Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings

“Compulsion is a tough time that everyone experiences and bears in various forms and ways.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“Изкуството приключва там,където започва принудата...
(Art ends where compulsion begins)”
― Петър Кръстев Petur Krustev

“Gardens are like relationships. If all is going well, they will constantly change and grow. If we are obsessive and controlling, we will lose the joy in it and miss out on all the unexpected and fantastic things that we neither planned nor even knew were possible. Care without compulsion is the key.”
― Donna Goddard, Geboor: Spiritual Fiction

“It was a devastating kiss, driven by impulse and need for what I knew would never be mine. Kora was the light of this world, and I was trapped in the darkness, where dim flames lit the night and left ash on our skin. And that's where I would always stay.
But for that small moment, with her lips against mine, she sucked in my shadows, and I breathed out her glow.”
― Audrey Rush, Dead Love