Compulsion Quotes

Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway. ~ H.L. Mencken

When someone is suffering, there is a deep, visceral reaction in the core of our being, a flood of empathy and a frightfully desperate compulsion to give aid. ~ Bryant McGill

What is it that every man seeks? To be secure, to be happy, to do what he pleases without restraint and without compulsion. ~ Epictetus

Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs. ~ John Dos Passos

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

By his own admission, Tom is nothing like his brother. He has neither the fierce ambition nor the compulsion for risk taking. ... Will relied on aggression to anchor the world while Tom passively accepted whatever the world would give or take away. Consequently Tom won no awards, achieved no fame, ... He drifted, bending to daily pressures, never protesting when he was deprived of what he should have rightfully claimed as his own. In his sad trip downstream, Tom dulled the pain with alcohol and a few joints a day - what he called his 'friendly haze'. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity. ~ Rem Koolhaas

I am a most unhappy man. I accidentally ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. Our government is no longer based on the freedom of opinion, nor on the conviction and the majority decision, it is now a government which is subjected to the conviction and the compulsion of a small group of dominant men. ~ Woodrow Wilson

What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals. ~ Temple Grandin

Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul. ~ Plato

The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real joy of living. ~ Walter Rauschenbusch

What we refer to as yoga is just a technology to make your energies function by choice, not by compulsion. ~ Jaggi Vasudev

Freud, who spoke German, used the term zwangsneurose (obsessional neurosis). The word zwang was translated as 'obsession' in London, but 'compulsion' in New York. Faced with confusion, scientists introduced the hybrid term 'obsessive-compulsive', a label subsequently given to millions of people, as a compromise. ~ David Adam

It is wrong to ask for more than you give freely. In this way, we come to resemble what we hate. ~ Stephen R. Donaldson

We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with Him and Him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin; only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds; only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. Solitude is a place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

It's funny - when I first started as an actor, obviously there were long periods of being idle and all you want to do is work. So if I ever get the compulsion to feel like I should complain or feel like I want to take a break, I just remember how I was before and be very grateful for it. ~ Neil Jackson

Human free will implies God's prior decision not to tamper with the metaphysical base of that free will. It also implies man's ability to reject the persuasion God uses to influence that free will while leaving its metaphysical base intact! Persuasion, not compulsion, is what even He must rely upon! And persuasion, by its very definition, must be resistible! ~ Don Richardson

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?
It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful if accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to wake up.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearranger of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentment of loss. ~ Joan Didion

He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [ ... ] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. ~ Ian McEwan

Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you and pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion? ~ Ayn Rand

I tend to work most often from the method of ignoring any ritualistic writing for long periods of time, and then I'll spend three straight weeks writing for 12 hours a day and just going through the motions with my worldly business because the compulsion to write descends upon me like a kind of madness. I don't mean to be dramatic, but it feels that way when it strikes. ~ Kevin Keck

I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks. ~ Alan Alda

The realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and of external utility is required. ~ Karl Marx

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion. ~ Carolyn Heilbrun

Parliamentary government is simply a mild and disguised form of compulsion. We agree to try strength by counting heads instead of breaking heads, but the principle is exactly the same ... The minority gives way not because it is convinced that it is wrong, but because it is convinced that it is a minority. ~ James Fitzjames Stephen

And, at the same time, we began to build schools that are all inside and no outside, all stone and no garden, all power and no humility, all hulking system and no small child, all gears and no flowers, all compulsion and no promise. ~ Anthony Esolen

The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I did not act from the habits of separation after my walk is not that I tried not to or chose not to. It is because of the attention I gave to the habits themselves and to the feelings underneath them. To give attention to a habit weakens its compulsion. To give attention to the condition underlying the habit robs it of its motivation. The feeling underlying all of my little plans was a kind of tender, helpless loneliness. I gave attention to these things without even having an agenda of stopping myself from acting on them. I trusted the power of attention to do its work. ~ Charles Eisenstein

motivation for not eating meat and dairy is to maintain optimal health, not to rid myself of the obsession and compulsion that are the hallmark of addiction. If obsession and compulsion are the issue - smoking cigarettes, not being able to stop texting your toxic ex, self-harm - and you want to get past it, you need a Bright Line. If health is your objective, there is no evidence that perfect is better than "really good." Seriously. You can comply with a health goal 95 percent of the time, and it will benefit you as much as 100 percent perfection. ~ Susan Peirce Thompson

Your unavowed atrocities kill you from the inside out. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It's a survival necessity. You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam. ~ Glen Duncan

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

The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary. "The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism. "Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self. "No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue. ~ Ayn Rand

I never get sick. Besides, I have this compulsion to take care of ailing Travises."
"You would be the only one. We Travises are bad-tempered as hell when we're sick."
"You're not all that nice when you're well either. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Affections injured by tyranny, or rigor of compulsion, like tempest-threatened trees, unfirmly rooted, never spring to timely growth ~ John Ford

I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this. I would be very glad to tell you my life if you want to hear of it. ~ Pete Seeger

The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality. ~ Max Horkheimer

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

In a sport that demands compulsion, sometimes the hardest task is having the confidence to rest. ~ Chris Lear

My brain didn't seem to want to conform itself to the task at hand and kept wandering to stupid things like a compulsion to line up all the blue M&Ms or count how many times the word "to" appeared in the "To be or not to be" speech (fifteen, as it turns out). ~ E.E. Holmes

In short, I will preach it [the Word], teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. ~ Martin Luther

Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. ~ Albert Einstein

Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog. ~ James Thurber

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort.

Then there are communities - far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage - whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christia ~ Alain De Botton

Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad's survival, as in that of Stalin's nation. If the city's inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given ~ Max Hastings

Venus yields to caresses, not to compulsion. ~ Publilius Syrus

It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work - his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy - and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe. He ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's (news) like balls in a Bingo hopper. The same events keep coming up over and over. Earthquake. Coup d'etat. Trade war. Hostage taking. My compulsion is to know whick balls are up on any given day. ~ Author

That much he understood now - the compulsion born of secrecy, how silence was its own sort of prison. The relief that came with being able to tell someone, anyone, all those things you were supposed to keep locked up. ~ Kit Rocha

Not one of you should serve him as of compulsion, but all should bless him while you serve him; yea, bless him for permitting you to serve him, fitting you to serve him, and accepting your service. To be a servant of Jehovah is an incalculable honour, a blessing beyond all estimate. To be a servant in his temple, a domestic in his house, is even more a delight and a glory: if those Who are ever with the Lord, and dwell in his own temple, do not bless the Lord, who will? ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

This vocation of yours.
She knew that a hunger dwelled in her, in that place where happier emotions should reside, a hunger she could neither sate nor deny. While her compulsion to scratch that itch never faded, she knew that she performed a service to the world in these coll west London rooms. While it was work for which she would receive not a single word of thanks, its value, Etienne believed, could not be denied. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

The elements of instruction . . . should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge . . . . Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536). ~ Will Durant

Compulsion is attraction without reason. ~ Candice Raquel Lee

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects ... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy) ~ Oliver Sacks

At its best, this is my calling. At its worst, it is a mad compulsion that I just can't shake. ~ Zoe Klein

Mother Nature, mothers, grandmothers - yes, even fathers, and grandfathers - are the best doctors around, because they do not share the typical doctor's compulsion to interfere with the body's efforts and ability to heal itself. ~ Robert S. Mendelsohn

The public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society - far from satisfying the wants of consumers - are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desire by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. ~ Murray Rothbard

Unbelievable," I said. "First you wanted to hide her away to keep you alive. Now you actually want her out in the world to use her compulsion for your own psycho plans. ~ Richelle Mead

We must insist that free oratory is only the beginning of free speech; it is not the end, but a means to an end. The end is to find the truth. The practical justification of civil liberties is not that self-expression is one of the rights of man. It is that the examination of opinion is one of the
necessities of man. For experience tells us that it is only when freedom of opinion becomes the compulsion to debate that the seed which our fathers planted has produced its fruit. When that is
understood, freedom will be cherished not because it is a vent for our opinions but because it is the surest method of correcting them. ~ Walter Lippmann

...there are many who want it but for whom the train of compulsion doesn't seem to stop. They never get that moment, that pause that will be long enough for them to get off. Because that's all it is - for some the train is too fast, some sleep through the stops, some jump off and jump right back on because they forget immediately that this is the death train. Me? I slept, went too fast, forgot... but then finally, stopped, limping on my broken toe, the lies falling off me, making me light, making me vulnerable. Making me strong. So strong that for one moment I could halt the whole fucking train. ~ Jowita Bydlowska

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. ~ Joan Didion

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 of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestor so, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves them- selves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

I remember that rape case you defended, but I missed the point. You love justice, all right. Abstract justice written down item by item on a brief - nothing to do with that black boy, you just like a neat brief. His cause interfered with your orderly mind, and you had to work order out of disorder. It's a compulsion with you, and now it's coming home to you - ~ Harper Lee

Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. 2 Corinthians 9:7 ~ Suzanne Crocker

The brain may die, but my compulsion for useless trivia lives on. ~ Molly Harper

A friend of yours?" Justiran's voice was detached and clipped.

"No," said Romeo. "But I've seen his heart. He's a good person."

"Do you know he put a compulsion on you?"

He forced me to, thought Paris, but he couldn't get the words out.

"Yes," said Romeo, "but . . ." His voice grew soft and wondering. "He loved Juliet. I'm sure of it."

Romeo was an idiot. Romeo thought nothing mattered besides who had what kind of pretty feelings about Juliet, and he was going to get them both killed by a necromancer. ~ Rosamund Hodge

Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one's own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one's own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name. ~ Friedrich Hayek

When you completely accept this moment, when you no longer argue with what is, the compulsion to think lessens and is replaced by an alert stillness. You are fully conscious, yet the mind is not labeling this moment in any way ... It is a shift from identification with form
the thought or the emotion
to being and recognizing yourself as that which has no form
spacious awareness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Glancing over at Jon, he wondered whether their shaky, three-part arrangement would survive the truth of Baltsaros's compulsion. He scratched the back of his head, turning the metal collar as he thought. If it did spell the end, would he be made to choose? The thought sobered him, and he drifted closer to Jon's side as they walked towards the brightly lit inn. Tom reached out and let his knuckles graze Jon's arm, a hidden touch just to ground him for the span of a heartbeat. Maybe Jon would turn a blind eye. Maybe they'd continue to live in denial that they both loved a fucking monster. Jon smiled at the brief caress, and Tom felt his chest get tight. Love was a bloody, fucking headache. ~ Bey Deckard

The greatest number of those who share [John Thomas] Perceval's concerns are the people who have more or less recovered from psychotic episodes, and remain haunted by a compulsion to find the essential meaning and importance of the extraordinary events through which they have lived, and may live through again. For them, this is not simply a scholastic concern, it is felt as an urgent opportunity for self-discovery. ~ Edward M. Podvoll

The free man is not he who defies the rules ... but he who, recognizing the compulsions inherent in his being, seeks rather to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest each day's experience. ~ Bernard Iddings Bell

Writing is born out of passion and desire, but it is bred, brought up, in obsession and compulsion. Feed your drive to persist. Damn your fears. Claim your writing as your own, ~ Susan Carol Hauser

Since outright slavery has been discredited, "democracy" is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept. ~ Joseph Sobran

The recurring lovesickness of my teenage years often brought debilitating side effects, the worst of these being a compulsion to write Christian poetry. ~ Matthew Pierce

You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible. ~ Geneen Roth

The state is a force incarnate. Worse, it is the silly parading of force. It never seeks to prevail by persuasion. Whenever it thrusts its finger into anything it does so in the most unfriendly way. Its essence is command and compulsion. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

It's always somebody's fault - I blame you for my helpless love - do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me ... ~ John Geddes

When she opened her eyes they were confronted by a musical box against the opposite wall - one of those early Bavarian toys where mechanical figures perform to the tune.

'How odd,' she thought. The little stage showed a group of fiddlers, two couples in costumes like those of the ball she had just quitted, and in a doorway at the side, a gypsy or beggar man.

Very faintly the distant waltz came to her ears, but no footsteps ringing in the abandoned halls.

With her hand pressed to her unsteady heart, acting under a sudden compulsion, she pushed down the lever. Delicate plucked music started up; the fiddlers sawed with their clumsy arms in time to an ethereal waltz. The couples moved jerkily out and each raised an arm to clasp its partner. To various clicks and rumbles from under the floor they began to revolve with each other and to orbit round the room. Their movements were sinister because of being both reluctant and predestined. Here they were and this is was what they must do. ("Many Coloured Glass") ~ Lucy M. Boston

I reeled with giddiness - flames passed before my eyes.
I remembered those precipices that drew one towards them with irresistible power - wells that have had to be filled up because of persons throwing themselves into them - trees that have had to be cut down because of people hanging themselves upon them - the contagion of suicide and theft and murder, which at various times has taken possession of people's minds, by means well understood; that strange inducement, which makes people kill themselves because others kill themselves. My hair rose upon my head with horror!
("The Invisible Eye") ~ Erckmann-Chatrian

There is a deep-seated tendency, it's almost a compulsion, to distract ourselves, even when we're not consciously feeling uncomfortable. Everybody feels a little bit of an itch all the time. There's a background hum of edginess, boredom, restlessness. As I've said, during my time in retreat where there were almost no distractions, even there I experienced this deep uneasiness. The ~ Pema Chodron

A man used to being obeyed, yes, but a man also inclined to care for others. Look after them. Driven to do it by a compulsion he couldn't leash, couldn't train out of him. Couldn't have broken out of him. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Wanderlust is like itchy feet. It's when you can't settle down. But Wanderlove is much deeper than that ... it's a compulsion. It's the difference between lust and love. ~ Kirsten Hubbard

I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too. ~ Jan Morris

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance. ~ Eric Hoffer

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I've never met a soldier who knew he was a hero. It's not false modesty. They simply decide to do something that they know they must do, usually for there comrades, because if they don't, those people will suffer in some way. For them, that compulsion is far stronger than any fear. The fact we find it exceptional is a sad indictment of the human race. I'd like to live in a world of heroes. If we did, there would be no wars. ~ Karen Traviss

It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them. ~ Martina Boone

Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse. ~ Alexander Pushkin

Love and delight are better teachers than compulsion. ~ Albrecht Durer

If we can implant in our people the Christian virtues which we sum up in the word character, and, at the same time, give them a knowledge of the line which should be drawn between voluntary action and governmental compulsion in a democracy, and of what can be accomplished within the stern laws of economics, we will enable them to retain their freedom, and at the same time, make them worthy to be free. ~ Winthrop W. Aldrich

For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year's Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

The practical reason for freedom is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fiber can be developed we have tried law , compulsion and authoritarianism of various kinds, and the result is nothing to be proud of. ~ Albert J. Nock

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery. ~ Steven Kotler

But I would not say a word until I could set aside all I know or believe about nations, war, leaders, the governed and the ungovernable; all I suspect about armor and entrails. First I would freshen my tongue, abandon sentences crafted to know evil--wanton or studied; explosive or quietly sinister; whether born of a sated appetite or hunger; of vengeance or the simple compulsion to stand up before falling down. I would purge my language of hyperbole, of its eagerness to analyze the levels of wickedness; ranking them, calculating their higher or lower status among others of its kind.
Speaking to the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood. Too holy an act for impure thoughts. ... I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say--no words stronger than steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.
And I have nothing to give either--except this gesture, this thread thrown between your humanity and mine: I want to hold you in my arms and as your soul got shot out of its box of flesh to understand as you have done, the wit of eternity; it's gift of unhinged release through the darkness of its knell. ~ Toni Morrison

It's a wonderful thing to perceive the world and to interact with it and with other people and nature from that deep place of utter stillness, where the compulsion to immediately label and interpret whatever arises around you is no longer there. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Our principle is: to prevent all command over man by his fellowmen, to, make state, government, laws, or whatsoever form of compulsion existing, a thing of the past, to establish full freedom for all. Anarchism means first and foremost freedom from all government. ~ Johann Most

The call to faith, in this light, is not some test of a coy god, waiting to see if we "get it right." It is the only summons, issued under the only conditions, which can allow us fully to reveal who we are, what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire. Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts ... The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not. ~ Terryl L. Givens

We noticed the parallels in our marriages -the forceful and decided women in charge, our quiet husbands, gentler than we were, gentler than most people we knew. We needed them, and they really needed us. It was nice to find a woman who felt burdened as I did by her own extroverted behaviour and vivid personality, by her own compulsion to manage. ~ Susanna Sonnenberg

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

It is precisely because we believe in democracy as a talisman, a heal-all, that we are prone to the disintegration of language that characterizes Life Under Compulsion. It ~ Anthony Esolen

But within ourselves we can experience a real difference between restlessness and solitude. What is that difference? It is the difference between living in freedom rather than compulsion; restfulness rather than restlessness; patience rather than impatience; inwardness rather than frenzied outwardness; altruism rather than greediness; authentic friendship rather than possessive clinging; and empathy rather than apathy.3 ~ Ronald Rolheiser