Compulsive Quotes & Sayings

Most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. — David Foster Wallace

Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. — Peter Medawar

You can see that there is scarcely an observable fact unworthy of mention in your notes, and yet you could easily spend more time scribbling than watching, and that would defeat the purpose. So be selective, don't be compulsive, and enjoy your note-taking. — Robert Pyle

My roommate and my boyfriend, they both know I am compulsive and controlling. — Christina Ricci

There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants to be a good citizen. The best media basically helps us strike a balance between those two things. — Eli Pariser

He hesitated till the last moment, but finally dropped them in the box, saying, "I shall win!"
the cry of a gambler, the cry of the great general, the compulsive cry that has ruined more men than it has ever saved. — Honore De Balzac

In the early stages the sexual needs will have the upper hand, in later stages the compulsive moralistic inhibition. At times of political upheavals of the total social organization, the conflict between sexuality and compulsive morality becomes most acute. This will impress some people as the "collapse of morality," other people as "sexual revolution." At any rate, the idea of the "decline of culture" is the perception of the breakthrough of natural sexuality. The only reason why it is experienced subjectively as "decline" is the fact that it threatens the compulsive moralistic way of living. What happens objectively is only the downfall of the sexual dictatorship which maintains the compulsive moralistic forces in the individuals in the interest of authoritarian marriage and family. — Wilhelm Reich

Man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn't bite the world off in one piece as a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does. He uses all kinds of techniques, which we call the "character defenses": he learns not to expose himself, not to stand out; he learns to embed himself in other-power, both of concrete persons and of things and cultural commands; the result is that he comes to exist in the imagined infallibility of the world around him. He doesn't have to have fears when his feet are solidly mired and his life mapped out in a ready-made maze. All he has to do is to plunge ahead in a compulsive style of drivenness in the "ways of the world. — Ernest Becker

form of the indissoluble, strictly monogamous marriage with an acceptance. in practice, of the freedom of the partners) or in the acceptance of new forms which contain however all the elements of the moral code of bourgeois marriage (the "free" union where the compulsive possessiveness of the partners is greater than within legal marriage). On the other hand we see the slow but steady appearance of new forms of relationships between the sexes that differ from the old norms in outward form and in spirit. Mankind is not groping its way toward these new ideas with much confidence. But we need to look at its attempt, however vague it is at the moment, since it is an attempt closely linked with the tasks — Anarcho-communist Institute

To be just without being mad (and the madder you get the madder you get), to be peaceful without being stupid, to be interested without being compulsive, to be happy without being hysterical ... smoke grass. — Ken Kesey

A flash of enlightenment offers a preview of coming attractions, but when it fades, you will see more clearly what separates you from that state - your compulsive habits, outmoded beliefs, false associations, and other mental structures. Just when our lives are starting to get better, we may feel like things are getting worse - because for the first time we see clearly what needs to be done. — Dan Millman

Memories are like Teek." said Pixie Pan, "You never can tell." (Teek being a compulsive lying and commitment-shy poltergeist.) — Stacey Lane

I think I have minor obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything has to be tidy and just right. — Bobby Davro

There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? — Peter Medawar

No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. — Geneen Roth

Eckhart Tolle says, "Addiction begins with pain and ends with pain," meaning that pain is behind compulsive behavior. Eleven years clean, I still feel the urge to medicate pain. Whenever events don't go my way, my first instinct is to annul the feeling, to look for an external resource to solve the problem. The second part of Eckhart's edict kicks in here - addiction "ends with pain." Medication of any kind offers only a temporary solution; it always leads back to pain and becomes therefore predictably cyclical. — Russell Brand

I'm a workaholic. I also go to the gym a lot - it's my new thing. Yes, I am a compulsive person. — Jonathan Rhys Meyers

We don't have to take things so personally. We take things to heart that we have no business taking to heart. For instance, saying "If you loved me you wouldn't drink" to an alcoholic makes as much sense as saying "If you loved me, you wouldn't cough" to someone who has pneumonia. Pneumonia victims will cough until they get appropriate treatment for their illness. Alcoholics will drink until they get the same. When people with a compulsive disorder do whatever it is they are compelled to do, they are not saying they don't love you - they are saying they don't love themselves. — Melody Beattie

In neuroscience, our textbook showed how the brain scans of people newly in love look a lot like the brain scans of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. In each case, your dopamine is suppressing your serotonin. — Daria Snadowsky

Compulsive? I lived and breathed refunding, and my children
benefited with their wide variety of toys, balls, and T-shirts
I obtained through my hobby. It was all a big game, and one that
I played well. And I was not alone. While there was no estimate
available on the number of people who were involved in refunding,
Carol Backs, publisher of Money Maker magazine in the
late 1980s and chairman of a trade association of refund magazine
publishers, claimed that refund magazines were selling eight
hundred thousand to one million subscriptions. — Mary Potter Kenyon

The hours spent forming a written work can make one obsessive, distracted, compulsive, and neurotic even, especially when it comes to those rare, precious occasions of streaming pure inspiration. To have a muse moment interrupted - to watch her scuttle back into hiding with unshared insight remaining on the tip of her tongue - is a wicked irritation. When a writer's eyes glaze over, when she stares off at nothing or appears to be memorizing the lines on a blank page, when she falls asleep at the desk ... tiptoe softly. For a writer's greatest desire is to receive inspiration; her greatest nightmare, to have tossed to the wind what could've been captured in words. — Richelle E. Goodrich

...the state of perfection is an elusive goal; demanding something so obscure as almost unattainable and can become a compulsive, crazy making squirrel-on-a-wheel way of living. — David W. Earle

I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember. — David Nicholls

Compulsive modernization is the insatiable desire to change and grow. — Samuel Wilson

Imagine Smaug's treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste. — Jim Butcher

Look you don't know I'm your soul mate," Lily said. " You barely know me at all. I have terrible habits. I swallow toothpaste. My socks don't always match. I'm not good at small talk. I'm just about the most unpopular kid in class, a close third behind the guy who doesn't shower and the girl who's a compulsive liar. Besides, it's not like Jake and me ... He was just being nice."
"You are my soul mate, even if you don't know it yet," Tye said — Sarah Beth Durst

I'm quite compulsive about exercise. For two months, I'll exercise every day, then for three months I'll do nothing. I love food, so exercise is important for me. — Josephine De La Baume

She walked through the underpass at the Elephant and Castle, enjoying the sense that nothing really mattered, not the truth about the past, nor whether they believed her, not Winnie's drinking or Vik's ultimatum. It was the perfect place to escape from a painful past. She could waste years at home trying to make sense of a random series of events. There was no meaning, no lessons to be learned, no moral - none of it meant anything. She could spend her entire life trying to weave meaning into it, like compulsive gamblers and their secret schema. Nothing mattered, really, because an anonymous city is the moral equivalent of a darkened room. She understood why Ann had come here and stayed here and died here. It wouldn't be hard. All she had to do was let go of home. She would phone Leslie and Liam sometimes, say she was fine, fine, let the calls get farther apart, make up a life for herself and they'd finally forget. — Denise Mina

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
E'en in Australia art thou still more hot
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
(Since that's your winter it don't mean a lot)
Sometimes too bright the eye of heaven shines
And bushfires start through half of New South Wales
Just so, when I do see thy bosom's lines
A fire consumes me and my breathing fails
But thine eternal summer shall not fade
This is in no way due to global warming;
Nay, from thy breasts shall verses fair be made
So damn compulsive they are habit-forming
So long as men can read and eyes can see
So long lives this, thou 34DD
(Based on an idea by William Shakespeare. I'm sure he'd agree that I've improved it) — Manny Rayner

Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We'd all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away. — Katandra Jackson Nunnally

I have a friend. He keeps trying to convince me he's a compulsive liar, but I don't believe him. — Ben Bailey

It's compulsive but we actually find the painful repetition pleasurable." He took another sip. "It doesn't sound pleasurable." "It's how we self-soothe. How we maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives. For example, you repeat 'Pick up' in hopes that the outcome each time will be different. And you are repeatedly embarrassed, are you not?" He waited for me to respond but I wouldn't meet his eyes. "You are hoping to master the experience. The pain is what we know. It's our barometer of reality. We never trust pleasure." Every time Howard looked at me I felt bare. — Stephanie Danler

No act of love is ever wasted. — Geneen Roth

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug. — Michelle Tea

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture? — David Bohm

tidying with what a couple of the other pianists had called her obsessive-compulsive neatness. Well, could she help it if she liked the sheet music alphabetized? And then put in numerical order according to the year it was written? — Elizabeth Bevarly

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden - but it's there. As we'll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain. — Gabor Mate

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.
I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop by nearly any bookstore I pass in order to get my fix. Books are an essential part of my life, the place where I have spent many unforgettable moments. For me, reading is one of the most enjoyable ways to pass a rainy afternoon or a leisurely summer day. I crave the knowledge and insights that truly great books bring into my life and can spend transported hours scouring used book stores for volumes which "I simply must have". I love the smell and feel of well-loved books and the look of a bookcase full of books waiting to be taken down and read. — Terry W. Glaspey

I'm a compulsive musician, but it's also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else. — Alexis Korner

When certain individuals feel severely threatened - emotionally, financially, physically - the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

I'm a compulsive note-taker, and I used to feel self-conscious about pulling out my little notebook and taking notes during a casual conversation. Then I noticed that people really seemed to enjoy it; the fact that I was taking notes made their remarks seem particularly insightful or valuable. Now I don't hold myself back. — Gretchen Rubin

My compulsive thoughts aren't even thoughts, they're absolute certainties and obeying them isn't a choice. — Paul Rudnick

I began reading cook books when I was six, cause my father had hundreds of cook books in the kitchen. I was obsessed with cooking and tasting different recipes. I got lost in being a compulsive eater. It brought me much happiness. Sadness too, sure. But I have to say, and compulsive eaters will agree with me, for that few seconds that you're eating, food tastes just great. — Richard Simmons

When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive. — Hisham Matar

Checking email every 45 seconds is not only compulsive, it's presumptuous. It suggests a belief that anyone who sends us a message needs us to read it immediately, even if the message is from SkyMall telling us our Bigfoot Garden Yeti statue has shipped. — Meghan Daum

Personally I'm obsessive-compulsive about the placement and cleanliness of my things. — Chace Crawford

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you're busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat, that you're cold, or, I don't know, heartbroken by a football game. An endless stream flowing to an audience of everyone and no one. — Alena Graedon

The most frequent manifestations of the anima takes the form of erotic fantasy. Men may be driven to nurse their fantasies by looking at films and strip-tease shows, or by day-dreaming over pornographic material. This is a crude, primitive aspect of the anima, which becomes compulsive only when a man does not sufficiently cultivate his feeling relationships-when his feeling attitude toward life has remained infantile. — C. G. Jung

I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage. — Fiona Apple

When you look at obesity in the United States, clearly it is not a bunch of stupid people. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Sometimes people who are dealing with issues of obesity and compulsive eating know more than I will ever know about nutrition, metabolism, and exercise, because they have studied it. But clearly the real problem, and therefore the real solution, is on another level of consciousness, and that is where the spiritual work comes in. — Marianne Williamson

The individual within the collective is never, or hardly ever, conscious of the prevailing thought style, which almost always exerts an absolutely compulsive force upon his thinking and with which it is not possible to be at variance. — Ludwik Fleck

Many people are in fact living with a diminished sense of meaning, and they struggle to fill the void within them by frantically pursuing power, money, pleasure, thrills, mind-altered states, or the latest psychic fad. Yet these compulsive cravings only serve to reveal the lack of purpose in their lives, poor substitutes for a life built around authentic purpose and genuine meaning. — John Chaffee

The greatest obstacle to experiencing the reality of your connectedness is identification with your mind, which causes thought to become compulsive. — Eckhart Tolle

Trying to write while I'm distracted definitely doesn't work for me. I'm also a compulsive saver of my files, so every writing session ends with me emailing what I've written to myself, just in case ... — Ian Doescher

Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking, you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, Now. — Eckhart Tolle

The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith. — Catherynne M Valente

Crawford washed her hands a lot. She washed her arms all the way up past her elbows. She just couldn't get enough done in that direction. She was compulsive about being clean, clean, clean! — Fay Wray

The compulsive talker must go through the herculean transformation of learning to quit or must become a great monologuist. — Norman Mailer

He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence — Jack Kerouac

write an article on the compulsive reading of news. The theme will be that most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers. Title — Robert A. Heinlein

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation. — Will Durant

We don't experience things collectively or cathartically anymore. Viewing has become an intensely private, fetishistic, compulsive process that happens separately from others, and that reflects not only our relation to cinema as a space of possibility, belief, and imagination. But more generally, of what could be, of readiness, which is what the movies have historically been about - the ability to act on things and change. — Masha Tupitsyn

Human beings, when confronted with the strange and inexplicable, have an immediate instinct to get back to the accustomed and the normal. We do not hug our miracles close; we put them hastily away, preferring the commonplace to live with it. It is as if some compulsive hand wipes clean the wall on which the handwriting appeared. — Fulton Oursler

Sometimes it's hard to know when you've crossed the line from conscientious to compulsive. When you're in the thick of an assignment, it's easy to believe that you must spend so much time brainstorming, researching, writing, testing, revising or what-have-you. Often, it's only after you've been working for hours on end that you realize that half the work you've been doing wasn't actually necessary and that you've just wasted a lot of time. — Michael Law

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Adderall or Ritalin TYPE 3. Impulsive-Compulsive Addicts SYMPTOMS Combination of types 1 and 2 BRAIN FINDINGS/NEURO-TRANSMITTER ISSUE High ACG plus low PFC/low S and DA SUPPLEMENTS 5-HTP plus green tea and rhodiola MEDICATIONS SSRI plus stimulant TYPE 4. Sad or Emotional Addicts SYMPTOMS Sad or depressed mood, winter blues, carbohydrate cravings, loss of — Daniel G. Amen

How did his brain come to derive comfort from fishing rather than from compulsive sexual behavior? At this point we simply don't know. Neurofeedback changes brain connectivity patterns; the mind follows by creating new patterns of engagement. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don't remember a time when I didn't have them. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, my symptoms didn't have a name, and you didn't go to the doctor to find out. — Howie Mandel

The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it's too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can't make it in the real world, in real jobs - isn't this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren't the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? For sure, instead of just wanting to believe something different about God's love, the losers I work with want to find salvation through compulsive behaviors. — Chuck Palahniuk

I don't relax. I can't take vacations. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I worry with every project that I'm going to fail. When it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it's a fantastic feeling, and I find it very hard to stop. — Mary Ellen Mark

I'm a compulsive enjamber. I'm drawn to half-meanings created by the line, so that's definitely an element of craft that's always on my mind. And I'm a big devotee of the short line, of couplets and tercets, and of irregular stanzas with lots of white space. I've got to give the dense language room to breathe! — Anna Journey

When the forces that seek to defy God whisper if in our ears - if God really loved me, I wouldn't feel like this ... If I really am beloved, then I should have everything I want ... if I really belong to God, things in my life wouldn't suck - to remember that God has named us and claimed us as God's own. When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God's grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, "I am baptized" or "I am God's," because nothing else gets to tell you who you are. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

We cannot be free of nagging desires through suppression. This is like trying to keep a rubber boat beneath the water. But we remove compulsive desires altogether by understanding their nature. — Vernon Howard

I'm a compulsive everything. — Mike Birbiglia

Even as a child Gates had an obsessive personality and a compulsive need to be the best. "Any school assignment, be it playing a musical instrument or writing papers, whatever, he would do at any or all hours of the day". — James Wallace

If you wish to take shamatha all the way to its ground, however, it requires a supportive, serene environment, good diet, proper exercise, and very few preoccupations. The necessary internal conditions are minimal desires, few activities and concerns, contentment, pure ethical discipline, and freedom from obsessive, compulsive thinking. It is my feeling that the achievement of shamatha is so rare today because those circumstances are so rare. It is difficult to find a conducive environment in which to practice at length and without interference - even more so to have that and access to suitable spiritual friends for support and guidance. Therefore, if the causes are difficult to bring together, the result - shamatha - is also necessarily rare. — B. Alan Wallace

If I had seen pictures of people eating each other on the wall, I would've told him I was into cannibalism. — Chelsea Handler

I sometimes have these spells of compulsive truth. But as Lady Macbeth would say, "The fit is momentary." — Ken Kesey

After one has been in a lowly position, one knows how dangerous it is to climb to a high place, Once one has been in the dark, one knows how revealing it is to go into the light. Having maintained quietude, one knows how tiring compulsive activity is. Having nurtured silence, one knows how disturbing much talk is. — Zicheng Hong

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same. — Joe Hill

the Army contracts private carriers to handle the overflow. In the Gulf War, they even had to resort to forcing major airline companies to cough up planes to make ends meet, under a compulsive federal system known as the Civilian Reserve Airfleet Program (my favorite government acronym of all time). — Piers Platt

The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock. — Donna Tartt

Janet seldom used the things she bought. Her home was full of clothes with the tags still attached. As with other of our clients, many things never left the original box or packing material. For those who suffer from compulsive buying but not hoarding, the purchased items are frequently returned, sold, or given away. For people who hoard, boxes pile up and gobble up living space. — Anonymous

The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents' worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I'll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I'll do without. — Robert A. Heinlein

You want to be a bit compulsive in your art or craft or whatever you do. You want to be focused on it. — Steve Martin

Our compulsive hunger always to know first, speak first and decide first has only been amplified by the fact that we can now all participate instantly in a virtual version of a national cocktail-party conversation on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. — John Podhoretz

I realized I was an anorexic, a bulimic, and a compulsive overeater. — Justine Bateman

Mood alteration is an ingredient of compulsive/addictive behavior. Addiction has been described as "a pathological relationship to any mood-altering experience that has life-damaging consequences." Toxic shame has been suggested as the core and fuel of all addiction. Religious addiction is rooted in toxic shame, which can be readily mood-altered through various religious behaviors. One can get feelings of righteousness through any form of worship. One can fast, pray, meditate, serve others, go through sacramental rituals, speak in tongues, be slain by the Holy Spirit, quote the Bible, read Bible passages, or say the name of Yahweh or Jesus. Any of these can be a mood-altering experience. If one is toxically shamed, such an experience can be immensely rewarding. — John Bradshaw

Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know ... — Marvin Mudrick

Freud, who spoke German, used the term zwangsneurose (obsessional neurosis). The word zwang was translated as 'obsession' in London, but 'compulsion' in New York. Faced with confusion, scientists introduced the hybrid term 'obsessive-compulsive', a label subsequently given to millions of people, as a compromise. — David Adam

SOCIETY AS COMPULSIVE AND ADDICTED Our society is highly addictive. We have sixty million sexual abuse victims. Possibly seventy-five million lives are seriously affected by alcoholism, with no telling how many more through other drugs. We have no idea of the actual impact on our economy of the billions of tax-free dollars that come from the illegal drug trade. Over fifteen million families are violent. Some 60 percent of women and 50 percent of men have eating disorders. We have no actual data on work addiction or sexual addictions. I saw a recent quotation that cited thirteen million gambling addicts. If toxic shame is the fuel of addiction, we have a massive problem of shame in our society. — John Bradshaw

Compulsive eating is an emotional problem, and we use an emotional approach to its solution. — Jean Nidetch

When people are told to 'eat many small meals,' what they may actually hear is 'eat all the time,' making them likely to respond with some degree of compulsive overeating. It's no coincidence, I think, that obesity rates began rising rapidly in the 1980s more or less in tandem with this widespread endorsement of more frequent meals. — Andrew Weil

The vital energies regulate themselves naturally without compulsive duty or compulsive morality both of which are sure signs of existing antisocial impulses. — Wilhelm Reich

By every measure, John Kennedy's sex life was compulsive and reckless. At one level, it had clear public consequences. Knowledge of Kennedy's behavior gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover absolute job security, as well as the potential power to derail Kennedy's re-election had he survived assassination. — Jeff Greenfield

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody's mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history. — Eckhart Tolle

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue. — Edmund White

I had never expected medicine to be such a lawless, uncertain world. I wondered if the compulsive naming of parts, diseases, and chemical reactions - frenulum, otitis, glycolysis - was a mechanism invented by doctors to defend themselves against a largely unknowable sphere of knowledge. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders. — Kimberly McCreight

It's like you have some sort of breast obsessive compulsive disorder. Have you considered seeking counselling for your addiction?' He sighed, face carefully set 'nothing wrong with a man admiring a fine female chest but if you disagree feel free to hold it against me. — Kylie Scott