It is not enough to recognize what is right and true. One must control the impulse to do what is wrong and easy.
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.
I'm competing with everyone, but it's okay because they're not aware. I can't shut that impulse off. And I'm glad, because that impulse keeps me on the treadmill. If I didn't have it, I would be like, "Great! Ten minutes! I'm good. " But if I'm competing, I can see what level someone's on and I can top it.
I do have an impulse to sort of leverage what I say against something I disagree with.
The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.
Pity, though it may often relieve, is but, at best, a short-lived passion, and seldom affords distress more than transitory assistance; with some it scarce lasts from the first impulse till the hand can be put into the pocket.
Led on by impulse, and blind and ungovernable desires.
The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.
After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.
I'm really not good with impulse control.
Moral good is a practical stimulus; it is no sooner seen than it inspires an impulse to practice.
This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.
I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.
In the documentary impulse, two species of 'fact' exist side by side: one is coolly objective and the other is fraught, diverse and emotive; one figurative, the other abstract; one prosaic, the other poetic; one factual, the other romantic.
I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.
I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they're all overweight.
The comic impulse is sometimes a reaction to sadness. You feel like you can make one choice or the other.
Somewhere between obsession and compulsion is impulse.
I must always have a clear image of the form of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no impulse to create.