Compels Quotes

Just as women fought for the vote, and that very achievement compels us to the polling stations, so women have fought for the right to exercise and participate in sport, and we cannot throw that away. From the women of ancient Greece putting their lives on the line just by watching sport, and the women in Iran who continue to risk imprisonment today by doing the same, to the likes of Kathrine Switzer who campaigned for women to be allowed to run any distance they liked, or Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand who demand the right to participate in sport as women, without being told what their labia should look like. We ~ Anna Kessel

Listen Morty, I hate to break it to you, but what people calls "love" is just a chemical reaction
that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a
failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus
on science. ~ Justin Roiland

People like us run the world not just by chance but because we're the only ones capable of doing it. We know your flaws. We know you better than you know yourselves. Our sense of honor compels us to take command, to guide the weak through times as dark as these. And our sense of humor compels us to enjoy it. ~ Nathan M. Farrugia

Isn't it amazing?" I asked. "How the ocean bows to the moon."
"Some people believe that it is the lure of the moon that compels the ocean's waves to swell. I believe that it's the ocean's dance that entices the moon's rays to shine upon it, ~ Nicole Gulla

Despite the madness of war, we lived for a world that would be different. For a better world to come when all this is over. And perhaps even our being here is a step towards that world. Do you really think that, without the hope that such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for one day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties, makes mothers renounce their children, or wives sell their bodies for bread, or husbands kill. It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope been stronger than man, but never also has it done so much harm as it has in the war, in this concentration camp. We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers. ~ Tadeusz Borowski

Economy: As an adjective, cheap; As a noun, that which compels us to render ourselves as such. ~ CrimethInc.

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

Ah, Lovely October, as you usher in the season that awakens my soul, your awesome beauty compels my spirit to soar like an leaf caught in an autumn breeze and my heart to sing like a heavenly choir. ~ Peggy Toney Horton

For it is obvious to everybody, I think, that this study [of astronomy] compels the soul to look upward and leads it away from things here to higher things. ~ Plato

We now believe it is appropriate for Saddam Hussein to be forced to change, either by the threat of war, and therefore that compels him to cooperate. If he cooperates, then the basis of changed regime policy has shifted because his regime has, in fact, changed its policy to one of cooperation. So if he cooperates, then that is different than if he does not cooperate. ~ Colin Powell

A genuinely humble attitude is one of the greatest skills in business. Because it compels us to LISTEN and LEARN. ~ Adam Rifkin

For if God is a title of the highest power, He must be incorruptible, perfect, incapable of suffering, and subject to no other being; therefore they are not gods whom necessity compels to obey the one greatest God. ~ Lactantius

Wealth, if not a mere flash in the pan, compels the wealthy to become wealthier. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

The novel does not say, it shows; it shows me my life in a figure: it compels me to stare at my toes. ~ William H. Gass

It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - 'voluntarily' sell - himself every day and hour to the 'beast of property.' ~ Johann Most

Do you think there is anything worse for a man than that which makes him choose what is bad for him instead what is good, and persuades him to cultivate the former and disregard the latter, and compels him to behave in the opposite way to that which is adopted by disciplined people? ~ Xenophon

Feminism will be just as oppressive to women as the media if it compels us to change who we are. The ends will not justify the means. It is like a corset that, although originally intended to make us feel good, about ourselves, has been pulled so tight that we are not left with enough room to breathe. Feminism often seems to be looking down its nose at us these days, as it militantly tells us how to behave- focusing on appearances according to a male dominated society. Have they forgotten that it is the societal viewpoint which needs to be changed? Somewhere along the line this movement got off track.


After all, we are constantly being told how to look, how to age, how to eat, how to act. Can't we at least think what we want? ~ Nancy Madore

Suppressing the fear of death makes it all the stronger. The point is only to know, beyond any shadow of doubt, that "I" and all other "things" now present will vanish, until this knowledge compels you to release them - to know it now as surely as if you had just fallen off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Indeed you were kicked off the edge of a precipice when you were born, and it's no help to cling to the rocks falling with you. If you are afraid of death, be afraid. The point is to get with it, to let it take over - fear, ghosts, pains, transience, dissolution, and all. And then comes the hitherto unbelievable surprise; you don't die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are. ~ Alan W. Watts

Behind great men, children, companies or homes are some extraordinary women! Take time today and always to acknowledge the women in your life with a show of gratitude. Love compels a woman's heart. Appreciation drives her commitment. Kindness fuels her strength. Compassion gives her courage. God gives her to you. ~ Carlos Wallace

The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a
solipsist. ~ Kedar Joshi

Today I do affirm that I am Divinely guided ... There is that within which knows what to do and how to do it, and it compels me to act on what it knows. ~ Ernest Holmes

Francaise with our own proper pack. This permission, we feel bound to say, was graciously granted; which compels us here to give a public contradiction to the slanderers who pretend that we live ~ Alexandre Dumas

For in the end, it is not Edwards or Piper or any other man who compels true faith, but God himself. ~ John Piper

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me. ~ Alain Badiou

The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I'm right. ~ Rob Sheffield

Offering thanks and singing praises to God, compels the Lord to act in our behalf, to either calm the storm to a whisper, or to give us the strength to endure the storm. Whichever He chooses, He brings us out of our distress and into His peace." Meet Him on the Mountain pg. 138. ~ Sheldon K. Bass

An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels it votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next. ~ Paul Valery

We don't know all the reasons that propel us on a spiritual journey, but somehow our life compels us to go. ~ Jack Kornfield

The labourer seeks to maintain the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labour, either by working a greater number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours. Thus, urged on by want, he himself multiplies the disastrous effects of division of labour. The result is: the more he works, the less wages he receives. And for this simple reason: the more he works, the more he competes against his fellow workmen, the more he compels them to compete against him, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as he does so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class. ~ Karl Marx

I understand addiction now. I never did before, you know. How could a man (or a woman) do something so self-destructive, knowing that they're hurting not only themselves, but the people they love? It seemed that it would be so incredibly easy for them to just not take that next drink. Just stop. It's so simple, really. But as so often happens with me, my arrogance kept me from seeing the truth of the matter.
I see it now though.
Every day, I tell myself it will be the last. Every night, as I'm falling asleep in his bed, I tell myself that tomorrow I'll book a flight to Paris, or Hawaii, or maybe New York. It doesn't matter where I go, as long as it's not here. I need to get away from Phoenix - away from him - before this goes even one step further.
And then he touches me again, and my convictions disappear like smoke in the wind.
This cannot end well. That's the crux of the matter, Sweets. I've been down this road before - you know I have - and there's only heartache at the end. There's no happy ending waiting for me like there was for you and Matt. If I stay here with him, I will become restless and angry. It's happening already, and I cannot stop it. I'm becoming bitter and terribly resentful. Before long, I will be intolerable, and eventually, he'll leave me. But if I do what I have to do, what my very nature compels me to do, and move on, the end is no better. One way or another, he'll be gone. Is it not wiser to end it now, Sweets, before it gets to t ~ Marie Sexton

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement. ~ Albert Camus

Reason must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything that the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witness to answer questions which he has himself formulated. ~ Immanuel Kant

... so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,
pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it? ~ Laurence Sterne

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be ... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

To close a fellow human being in your heart compels more respect than attending 1000 Christmas Masses. ~ Ben Midland

The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. ~ Helen Keller

As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago. ~ Harriet Martineau

Are you not compelled to work for an employer? Your need compels you just as the highwayman's gun. You must live ... You can't work for yourself ... The factories, machinery, and tools belong to the employing class, so you must hire yourself out to that class in order to work and live. Whatever you work at, whoever your employer may be, it always comes to the same: you must workfor him. You can't help yourself. You are compelled. ~ Alexander Berkman

Sometimes I think it is ... frustration with life as it is lived day to day that compels me to write such long letters to people who seldom reply in kind, if indeed they reply at all. Somehow by compressing and editing the events of my life, I infuse them with a dramatic intensity totally lacking at the time, but oddly enough I find that years later what I remember is not the event as I lived it but as I described it in a letter. ~ Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

He learned, though slowly, what all great harrowed lovers learn: that love is what most surely compels love
is perhaps, except for brute force, the only thing that does, though only (and this was the terrible gift he had been given) when the lover truly believes, as August could, that when his love is strong enough it must surely be returned
and August's was. ~ John Crowley

Universal violence compels the language to be mute ... Silence is not only a metaphor of Hemingway's work; it is also the source of its formal excellence, its integrity. ~ Ihab Hassan

A mere enumeration of government activity is evidence
often the sole evidence offered
of "inadequate" nongovernment institutions, whose "inability" to cope with problems "obviously" required state intervention. Government is depicted as acting not in response to its own political incentives and constraints but because it is compelled to do so by concern for the public interest: it "cannot keep its hands off" when so "much is at stake," when emergency "compels" it to supersede other decision making processes. Such a tableau simple ignores the possibility that there are political incentives for the production and distribution of "emergencies" to justify expansions of power as well as to use episodic emergencies as a reason for creating enduring government institutions. ~ Thomas Sowell

Isaiah himself was only more aware of his shame as it stood in contrast to the perfection and purity of the Lord. It brought him to despair at his predicament. But despair is not a bad thing when it compels us to trust in or be associated with God himself. ~ Edward T. Welch

Could some similar paradox be responsible for the crisis in modern physics - some unconscious blockage which prevents us from seeing the 'obvious', and compels us to persist in our own version of wavemechanical double-think? ~ Arthur Koestler

Miracle focus messages compels masses to think that the process of production is not necessary for prosperity ~ Sunday Adelaja

Be brave. Write what's true for you. Write what you think. What about what confuses you and compels you. Write about the crazy, hard, and beautiful. Write what scares you. Write what makes you laugh and write what makes you weep. What what makes you feel ashamed or proud. Writing is risk and revelation. There's no need to show up at the party if you're only going to stand around with your hands in your pockets and stare at the drapes. ~ Cheryl Strayed

My trip to the former Yugoslavia had opened the world for me, and my hunger for the world. In doing so, it undid the contained, safe borders of my existence. Suddenly a woman weeping over her lost son in an image on the front page of The New York Times was no longer a theoretical entity. She was real, a woman I might have met, might have known. I was connected to her. I could no longer divorce myself from her pain, her suffering. Initially this was overwhelming. I had nightmares. I felt restless and wrong in my comforting life in America. Everything seemed absurd and pointless. I came to understand why we block out the pain and atrocities of others. That pain, if we allow it to enter us, makes our lives impossible. It forces us to examine our own values and reality. It insists that we be responsible for others. It thrusts us into the messy world where there are no easy solutions or reasons, only struggles and questions. It creates great fissures in the landscape of our insulated, so-called safe reality. Fissures that, once split open, can never close again. It compels us to act. ~ Eve Ensler

Whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two." Matthew 5:41 Our Lord's teaching can be summed up in this: the relationship that He demands for us is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural work in us. Jesus Christ demands that His disciple does not allow even the slightest trace of resentment in his heart when faced with tyranny and injustice. ~ Oswald Chambers

And what if Christ's call in our lives is not to comfort in our culture? What if Christ in us actually compels us to counter our culture? ~ David Platt

Hiding compels a heightened intimacy with oneself. ~ Glenn Haybittle

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. ~ Roland Barthes

What is Hope?Hope is that inner dynamic that compels us to explore and pursue the expectations built into the human condition. Hope was born the day the first human beings discovered the first bridge and decided not to jump off the bridge in despair, but to cross it ~ Henri Nouwen

I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years. ~ Ira Sachs

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know,
he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact
he drives you from the realm of reason
he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture
into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Alas, respect for the truth compels perfect honesty ~ Neil Gaiman

Love for him compels us to live for him. ~ Bryan Chapell

One's soul is made up of the unity of conscience and what compels you. That is, at the core, there is already a devotional relationship between these two. We just need to realize that and give them both the freedom to do what they wish. ~ Darrell Calkins

You feel like you're cursed. Death follows you wherever you go and you feel completely abandoned. You wish it would all end for you. You think that death would be a release, yet something compels you forward."
The blood drained from Gabe's face as he listened to Uri speak. "You're not alone, Gabe, there are many more like us and we want to help you. ~ Wendy Owens

There are, I have discovered, ten commandments for mother-in-law. These rules are not mine. They come from mothers-in-law of every color, race, class, and disposition. Given the diversity of the women, the uniformity of opinion on this compels attention -- also discussion. Here are the ten most recommended rules:
1. Keep your mouth shut.
2. Keep your mouth shut.
3. Keep your mouth shut.
4. Keep your mouth shut.
5. Keep your mouth shut.
6. Keep your mouth shut.
7. Keep your mouth shut.
8. Keep your mouth shut.
9. Keep your mouth shut.
10. Keep your mouth shut. ~ Susan Abel Lieberman

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape. ~ Fennel Hudson

Bodily passion, which has been so unjustly decried, compels its victims to display every vestige that is in them of unselfishness and generosity, and so effectively that they shine resplendent in the eyes of all beholders. ~ Marcel Proust

I would not question the sincerity of vegetarians who take little interest in Animal Liberation because they give priority to other causes; but when nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first" I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals. ~ Peter Singer

Do nothing in a depressed mood, nor as one afflicted, nor as thinking that you are in misery, for no one compels you to that. ~ Epictetus

What happened on September 11 compels us to focus on who we are as Americans, what we stand for, what really matters in our lives - family, friends, faith and freedom. ~ Bob Taft

In his day news could not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest, intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try - but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains. ~ Mark Twain

I grant you that, if you'll admit, as I do, that we are pawns of an unknown force that lives within us that dictates our actions and compels us to speak this language. ~ Jean Cocteau

Untouchability shuts all doors of opportunities for betterment in life for Untouchables. It does not offer an Untouchable any opportunity to move freely in society; it compels him to live in dungeons and seclusion; it prevents him from educating himself and following a profession of his choice. ~ B.R. Ambedkar

Like everything, what compels one to put pen to paper is a great question. ~ Todd Solondz

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Western culture prefers us not to believe we're defined or limited. It wants us to buy the fiction that the self is open, free, nothing but pure, bright possibility; that we're all born with the same suite of potential abilities, as neural 'blank slates', as if all human brains come off the production line at Foxconn. This seduces us into accepting the cultural lie that says we can do anything we set our minds to, that we can be whoever we want to be. This false idea is of immense value to our neoliberal economy. The game it compels us to play can best be justified morally if all the contestants start out with an equal shot at winning. Moreover, if we believe we're all the same, this legitimizes calls for deregulated corporation and smaller government: it means that men and women who lose simply didn't want it badly enough, that they just didn't believe - in which case, why should anyone else catch their fall? ~ Will Storr

Fear left unrestrained always leaves us running 'from' something. Fear harnessed compels us to run 'to' something. And fear denied leaves us running in circles. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.

When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology.

The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul's immortality, or 'personality,' as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, 'pathological,' in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and m ~ Thomas A. Edison

Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels,
None other holds you that ye live and die,
And whirl upon the wheel, and hug and kiss
Its spokes of agony,
Its tire of tears, its nave of nothingness. ~ Edwin Arnold

People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland ... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given. ~ Sue Grafton

The object of defense is preservation; and since it is easier to hold ground than to take it, defense is easier than attack. But defense has a passive purpose: preservation; and attack a positive one: conquest ... If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object. ~ Carl Von Clausewitz

That part of us that is meant to lead us in life, from which we are meant to lead, and from which we are meant to have guidance. The very thing that compels us to breathe, compels us to find hope in the midst of darkness - that part of us gets buried and overshadowed by fear. ~ Rod Stryker

Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Unbeknownst to me, it had become my mission to prove that the world isn't the horrible place we often make it out to be. That just because there are some dirty fish, it doesn't mean the entire ocean is dirty and we need to confine ourselves to the shores we know. The fear bred by the news compels people to stay at home - trapped in a shrinking comfort zone - like it had once compelled me. I had much to unlearn for the sake of the freedom I chased, the victimhood I despised and my mission to build unlikely friendships. ~ Shivya Nath

The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another. ~ James Mill

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands
-excerpt of #35 from 100 Selected Poems ~ E. E. Cummings

Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats's famous couplet: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite. ~ Ross Andersen

There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God. ~ John Le Carre

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life ... Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: My yoke is easy and my burden is light. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. ~ Karl Marx

Instead of explaining everything by the supposed supremacy of a law of evolution, which compels collective phenomena to reproduce and repeat themselves indefinitely in a certain order, - instead of thus explaining lesser facts by greater, and the part by the whole, - I explain collective resemblances of the whole by the massing together of minute elementary acts - the greater by the lesser and the whole by the part. ~ G. Tarde

God's love compels us beyond bitter heartaches that we might show genuine compassion. - Kathleen Kohler - ~ Gary Chapman

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. But considered from a logical point of view, the situation is never such that it compels us to stop at this particular basic statement rather than at that, or else give up the test altogether. For any basic statement can again in its turn be subjected to tests, using as a touchstone any of the basic statements which can be deduced from it with the help of some theory, either the one under test, or another. This procedure has no natural end. ~ Karl Popper

Sometimes, our pride compels us to engage in costly wars when a true commitment to a compromising peace would have been the best course to pursue. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Cynicism is that blackguard defect of vision which compels us to see the world as it is, instead of as it should be. ~ Ambrose Bierce

I am willing to spend whatever it takes ... My moral standard compels me to speak out on this issue because I am the largest company by far in the industry and I am willing to speak out. I don't see any compelling reason for the government to allow people to gamble on the Internet and nobody has ever explained except for the two companies whose special interest is going to be served if there is gaming on the Internet, Caesars and MGM. ~ Sheldon Adelson

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Packing a bag doesn't make you aware of changes, rather it compels you to postpone the past, and the present is taken up with concerns about the immediate. Time slides over the travelers' skin. ~ Andres Neuman

The embrace of essential beastliness, made scientific and respectable by a reading of Darwin that may or may not have done justice to his intentions, thrilled and enthralled Western thought in certain quarters and in fact still does enthrall persons and groups that experience live in society as a barely tolerable constraint on a kind of freedom they consider a birthright. This freedom appears to have most of the essential features of a war of each against all, whether a hot war that compels them to go armed to Starbucks or to church or a cold war that makes a virtue of craftiness and guile, the ability to loot and wreck the national economy without getting caught. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Grace does not lead us to overlook obedience. Grace compels and empowers us for obedience. ~ Kevin DeYoung

Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can't escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. And how or why did such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness? Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing? Who (stranger still) want to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their hearts? People like H. herself, who would have truth at any price. ~ C.S. Lewis

A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes. ~ Flann O'Brien

Some people will not understand what the love of Christ compels you to do; do it anyway. ~ Sheila Walsh

The ambition of men compels them to break even the most heartfelt vows. ~ A.H. Septimius

I had always believed that the very best food contains something elementally repugnant. That its innate grotesquerie is what makes it so perversely alluring. My own favorite foods tended toward a certain sludgy, muddy texture. And from the most expensive and genteel through to the indulgently crass, the appeal of slop abides: caviar, escargots, foie gras or hamburgers, kebabs, macaroni and cheese. Even vegetable soup forms a membrane. Apples begin rotting from the very first bite. No matter which end of the spectrum, there lies fundamentally and yet delectably disgusting, some squirmy, sinewy, oozing, greasy, sticky, glutinous, mushy, fatty, chewy, viscous thing that compels. The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin, if it even exists at all. ~ Lara Williams