Compels Me Quotes & Sayings

For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man- not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia. — Ortega Y Gasset

I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years. — Ira Sachs

By my intimacy with nature I find myself withdrawn from man. My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening, compels me to solitude. — Henry David Thoreau

I have a curiosity that compels me to find ways to make music that are fresh and new. — The Edge

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

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say. — Charles Caleb Colton

Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn't; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten. — Catherynne M Valente

There are plenty of people in the world whose lives are governed by rote and routine. Such people will never be happy dealing with me, because I don't conform. Luckily, the world is also full of people who care about results, and those people are usually very happy with me, because my Asperger's compels me to be the ultimate expert in whatever field of interest I choose. And with substantial knowledge, I can obtain good results. — John Elder Robison

Candor compels me to admit that I have no conclusive research to support my view that jingles are less persuasive than the spoken word. You'd run like hell if a salesman came to your door and began singing at you. Why do it in advertising? — David Ogilvy

... so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,
pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it? — Laurence Sterne

When you put your preferences on the altar of your life and say: THIS. THIS is what compels me. The real you emerges. — Danielle LaPorte

Law is never so necessary as when it has no ethical significance whatever, and is pure law for the sake of law. The law that compels me to keep to the left when driving along Oxford Street is ethically senseless, as is shewn by the fact that keeping to the right answers equally well in Paris; and it certainly destroys my freedom to choose my side; but by enabling me to count on everyone else keeping to the left also, thus making traffic possible and safe, it enlarges my life and sets my mind free for nobler issues. Most laws, in short, are not the expression of the ethical verdicts of the community, but pure etiquette and nothing else. What they express is the fact that over most of the field of social life there are wide limits within which it does not matter what people do, though it matters enormously whether under given circumstances you can depend on their all doing the same thing. — George Bernard Shaw

Nature's probably my greatest inspiration. Everything I need is found in nature, it compels me to create and care. If you can't find what you're looking for in wild places or the eyes of wild creatures, it probably doesn't exist. — Todd Michael Cox

My spirit gets nourished in faraway places. Sometimes I wonder if it's a biological need, perhaps a biological flaw, that compels me to seek the excitement and challenge that comes of being in a place where nobody knows me.

Other times I think that my compulsion to settle into communities that are different from the ones I know is related to my passion for experiential learning. I learn best and most happily by doing, touching, sharing, tasting. When I'm somewhere I've never been before, learning goes on all day, every day. — Rita Golden Gelman

I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I'm here. I'm here because I've got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I'm here because I'm supposed to be here. I'm here because you can't keep me away. — Bryan Stevenson

No reason compels me to maintain that the body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse. And, indeed, experience seems to urge a different conclusion. Sometimes a man undergoes such changes that I should hardly have said he was the same man. — Baruch Spinoza

I am willing to spend whatever it takes ... My moral standard compels me to speak out on this issue because I am the largest company by far in the industry and I am willing to speak out. I don't see any compelling reason for the government to allow people to gamble on the Internet and nobody has ever explained except for the two companies whose special interest is going to be served if there is gaming on the Internet, Caesars and MGM. — Sheldon Adelson

Today I do affirm that I am Divinely guided ... There is that within which knows what to do and how to do it, and it compels me to act on what it knows. — Ernest Holmes

Part of what compels me to write day after day, chapter after chapter, is the discovery process, seeing the characters evolve as I get deeper and deeper into the story. — Jillian Medoff

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape. — Fennel Hudson

Who is setting the bar for what you call accessibility? The definition of "accessible" is "easy to understand," and so much of the fiction I love is just ... not that. It is complex and rich and sometimes puzzling, and it stays with me precisely because I can't quite wrap my head around it. Sometimes it is lucid and approachable on the surface, and other times the language is congested in order to fire up strong sensations. Accessibility is such a strange, sad measure of the writing I love. Dora the Explorer is accessible. The Unconsoled is not. But I have never been deliberately difficult, if that's what you're getting at. That has no appeal to me. I've always tried to write the fiction that compels me the most - I have to feel passionate, engaged, and nearly desperate if I'm going to get anything done. When I'm working on material that is conceptual or abstract or in some way difficult, I strive for clarity, transparency, a vivid attack. — Ben Marcus

An orgasm is not what I want and I know it. What I want, need, is so much more than that. It's the connection.The exhilarating contact with this human being, a being that compels me like no other. I miss his touch, his kiss. I don't care if he gives me just a little kernel of what he can give; I'm just starving to be fed, and my body has never been like this hungry. — Katy Evans

When the universe compels me toward the best path to take, it never leaves me with "maybe," "should I," or even "perhaps." I always know for sure when it's telling me to proceed - because everything inside me rises up to reverberate "YES! — Oprah Winfrey

My varnashram refuses to bow the head before the greatest potentate on earth, but my varnashram compels me to bow down my head in all humility before knowledge, purity, before every person where I see God face to face. — Mahatma Gandhi

Though I realize that you are both a little annoyed with me, and this might not be the time to shower myself with praise," Jace said slowly, "honesty compels me to tell you: Yes. Yes, I do think I am hilarious. 'There goes Jace Herondale,' people say. 'Cutting wit, and also totally cut. It's a burden Simon could never understand. — Cassandra Clare

Whatever defamation of character my enemies are spreading about me, I do not feel the need to justify myself toward them. While discretion obliges me to remain silent, my duty compels me to prevent them from doing any more harm. — Toussaint Louverture

My travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene. — Vandana Shiva

Do I want to tackle a 230-pound guy who's running like a deer? Heavens no, no one in their right mind would. But there is something that drives me and compels me to stick my head in there and give it my best shot. — Hale Irwin

I have seen landscapes ... which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do. — C.S. Lewis

What compels me to fight this society is, of course, outrage over injustice, a love of freedom, and a feeling of responsibility for perpetuating and enlarging the human spirit - its beauty, creativity, and latent capacity to improve the world. I do not care to come to terms with an irrational society that corrodes all that is valuable in humanity, that eats away at all that is beautiful and noble in the human experience. — Murray Bookchin

Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time. — David Morrell

Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands
-excerpt of #35 from 100 Selected Poems — E. E. Cummings

I dislike my fellow-mortals. Justice compels me to add that they appear for the most part to dislike me.
The Man from Archangel — Arthur Conan Doyle

I feel. I feel. Strong and untouchable and capable. An exquisite glow of joy fills me up and extinguishes my anger. For this instant, I am whole again. I am not broken or empty. The shadow-self inside me that compels me to kill is silent. I am unburdened. I am complete. — Elizabeth May

But for a little second, I just want to sit in this stupid chair and believe there is this sort of magic between two people and I can be this prized someone to this sexy, raw, primitive man who's so strong, mysterious, and playful to me, he compels me like nothing in my life ever has. — Katy Evans

I should ask her to marry me now. If I do it while she's coming, she probably won't be able to say no. It would be physically impossible. Like performing a sex exorist. THE POWER OF THE ORGASM COMPELS YOU! — Tara Sivec

Sometimes I think it is ... frustration with life as it is lived day to day that compels me to write such long letters to people who seldom reply in kind, if indeed they reply at all. Somehow by compressing and editing the events of my life, I infuse them with a dramatic intensity totally lacking at the time, but oddly enough I find that years later what I remember is not the event as I lived it but as I described it in a letter. — Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going. — Cary Fukunaga