Top 66 Compulsion Quotes

When people talk about how the Internet has changed the way we travel, they typically lament the way our compulsion to document removes us, somehow, from the actual experience.

Generally speaking, there’s some quality of compulsion that attaches itself to the idea of the list. It’s true that lists organise the daily chaos of working life. But the impulse to make lists has to do with something more than either administrative practicalities or the record of a creative process.

I guess I don’t try to justify climbing or defend it, because I can’t. I see climbing as a compulsion that, at its best, is no worse than many other compulsions – golf or stamp collecting or growing world-record pumpkins.

Prayer is commission. Out of the quietness with God, power is generated that turns the spiritual machinery of the world. When you pray, you begin to feel the sense of being sent, that the divine compulsion is upon you.

Telling stories has been a compulsion of mine since I could physically say, ‘Once upon a time…’ But in high school, I realized I could study creative writing in college and actually pursue it as a viable career.

Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

The inexorable compulsion of all things is towards health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live.

Earlier in my career, there may have been compulsions for accepting films for money.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every ‘should’ is a compulsion, and not every ‘like’ is a high morality and true freedom.

For me writing and acting all comes out of the same place, a compulsion to review and connect to something. For me they are more similar than different.

It’s a compulsion. I’m always changing parts of me. Even when I was young, I wanted to change my hair color. I was so determined that I dyed my hair with Kool-Aid.

The compulsion to do the opposite of what you are told does not lend itself to many occupations outside the entertainment industry. Within the industry, it is unlikely that you will be very successful without it.

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.

My compulsion is to create things.

I went through a period when I was addicted to gambling. It was a compulsion that I struggled to get to grips with. By 1990, it was in danger of ruining my life.

Motivation is just this potion to create stuff, a compulsion to express the truth of my own experiences in this life.

As the son of a feminist mother, I grew up with the idea that work was a sort of salvation for women as it would give them freedom from the domestic grind. Now it seems work is a form of slavery, undertaken out of apparent compulsion rather than choice.

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.

Food compulsion isn’t a character disorder; it’s a chemical disorder.

Sometimes it’s even hard to tell the difference between a tic and a compulsion. But while tics stem from an urge in a specific part of the body – either completely unconsciously or through a premonitory sensation that’s satisfied only by the tic – OCD bubbles up as conscious thoughts in the mind.

Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.

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.

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.

It is this compulsion to look backwards at a time of crisis because one’s got no idea of what lies ahead. There is a notion of security that somehow it must resemble the past. It’s never going to. Just because we muddled through in the past doesn’t mean we can automatically muddle through in the future.

I write because something inner and unconscious forces me to. That is the first compulsion. The second is one of ethical and moral duty. I feel responsible to tell stories that inspire readers to consider more deeply who they are.

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

I don’t miss ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I feel less of a need for the fulfillment that performance used to give… I don’t have to do everything right away. As long as I can walk and jump, I’ll still perform, but I no longer feel such a compulsion.

The compulsion of fate is bitter.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists – I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time – and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.

Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society.

Those of us with this ancient compulsion to tell stories sometimes start with a single kernel of something.

Now that I have joined Instagram, I think I’m on it less than before. Earlier, I used to be there all the time. I’m enjoying it because it’s where you have complete control on what you’re putting out, as you want it. I don’t feel there’s a compulsion to be active.

I must always, always have a box of Extra chewing gum in my bag because I have developed a terrible cheek-chewing compulsion. It’s not only uncomfortable, but I look really weird when I’m doing it, and chewing gum is the only way I can stop myself.

Where there is a will there is a way. And this must be the way not of compulsion but of cooperation… No government and no plan can succeed without it.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.

I don’t write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It’s a sickness on some level. It’s a compulsion.

Grooming oneself with all the crazed compulsion of an under-exercised lab rat in order to hook a rich man and obtain a lush lifestyle makes a certain (albeit seedy) sense.

Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.

As a child, I was always making sound; it was a compulsion. I loved to scream and yell and sing; it freed me from all the thoughts in my head. I begged for opera lessons because opera singing is the most formidable, most emotional way to use your voice.

Sometimes you have compulsions that you can’t control coming from the subconscious… they are the dictator inside ourselves.

I started writing ‘Brick Lane’ when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing.

I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it’s much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.

Each story presents a mystery that has to be solved in the process of writing. When I’m at work on a story, I’m completely immersed in that world and in the lives of those characters; they’re utterly real to me. Then, when I’ve completed the story, it all just falls away. The whole compulsion to understand is over.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

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 think it’s in our nature to try to get beyond that next horizon. I think that when we, as a species, are scratching that itch, we’re actually following an evolutionary compulsion that is wired into us. I think good things come of it.