“ I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. ”
- Ayn Rand- Copy
- 905
“ For what the horse does under compulsion, as Simon also observes, is done without understanding; and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer. ”
- Xenophon- Copy
- 2.6K
“ Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord. ”
- Joseph Ratzinger- Copy
- 3.7K
“ We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully. ”
- Martin Buber- Copy
- 644
“ No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man. No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory. ”
- Plato- Copy
- 1K
“ Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. ”
- Plato- Copy
- 289
“ Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. ”
- Betty Friedan- Copy
- 3.4K
“ In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void. ”
- Ursula K. Le Guin- Copy
- 482
“ A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity. ”
- Niccolo Machiavelli- Copy
- 2.5K
“ All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. ”
- Aristotle- Copy
- 3.1K
“ Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic. ”
- Julie Burchill- Copy
- 630
“ The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water. He found that captive white-footed mice spent inordinate time and energy just resisting experimental manipulation. If the experimenters turned the lights up, the mouse spent his time turning them down… ”
- Martin E. P. Seligman- Copy
- 3.7K
“ Very frequently, feminine activity also expresses itself in what is largely a retrospectively oriented pondering over what we ought to have done differently in life, and how we ought to have done it; or, as if under compulsion, we make up strings of causal connections… ”
- Emma Jung- Copy
- 1.7K
“ This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence… ”
- William Shakespeare- Copy
- 2.9K
“ There's an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence. ”
- Jonathan Raban- Copy
- 3.6K
“ The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure. Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon. The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness. ”
- Henri Lefebvre- Copy
- 125
“ 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. ”
- Ivan Illich- Copy
- 923
“ Only he who can view his own past as an abortion sprung from compulsion and need can use it to full advantage in the present. For what one has lived is at best comparable to a beautiful statue which has had all its limbs knocked off in transit, and now yields nothing but the precious block out of which the image of one's future must be hewn. ”
- Walter Benjamin- Copy
- 1.6K
“ Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation. ”
- George Bernard Shaw- Copy
- 1.5K
“ 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. ”
- Simone Weil- Copy
- 3.3K
- 1