It is not enough to recognize what is right and true. One must control the impulse to do what is wrong and easy.
Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, the fear instinct.
I'm a big believer that media is an impulse business.
Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the south-west corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God's earth, and one's first impulse, standing on a cliff top surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.
Much music teaching seems more concerned with controlling the student than with encouraging the student's own impulses.
I think being a woman alone enhanced the impulse in others to be generous. What we're told is that to be a woman alone is to be in a dangerous situation. The message is that people are gong to prey on you and do bad things to you. That may be true in some cases, but what I experienced was the other case.
Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.
When the opportunity is there, when the impulse is there
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
You don't pick up cues, you pick up impulses.
Hence, in desiring, the more the enjoyment is delayed, the more fancy begins to weave about the object images of future fruition, and to clothe the desired object with properties calculated to inflame the impulse.
The best ideas will eat at you for days, maybe even weeks, until something, some incident, some impulse, triggers you to finally express them.
. . . we have gratefully to receive from the hand of God the institution of the state with its magistrates as a means of preservation. . . . On the other hand. . . by virtue of our natural impulse, we must ever watch against the danger which lurks for our personal liberty in the power of the state.
The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
Only man is a narcissistic enough species to think that a highly evolved alien life force would travel across billions and billions of light-years- a group of aliens so intelligent, so insouciant, so utterly above it all, they feel no need whatsoever to equip their spacecraft with windows so that they can gaze out on all that celestial beauty-but then immediately upon landing, their first impulse is to get in some hick's ass with a flashlight.
I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I've thought, 'Why don't I just act on that impulse?' But then, I've never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I've never hit anybody for fun.
Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.