Impelled Quotes & Sayings

Look at the way you and I have ended up. I renounced and abandoned the world in order to be here and devote myself entirely to the service of Christ far away from people. And now you return to me after embracing Islam, clad in nothing but tunic and waist-cloth, and with nothing to your name but a staff to walk on. Tell me, for Heaven's sake: What is the difference between us? Is not your renunciation of the world the same as mine? And, my dear: Is it not the same rejection of the state of the world and its inhabitants that has impelled both of us to leave everything behind, realizing as we do that there is no hope to be found in this world and that there is nothing left for us but the love of God? — Salwa Bakr

When we see the shameful fortunes amassed in all quarters of the globe, are we not impelled to exclaim that Judas' thirty pieces of silver have fructified across the centuries? — Sophie Swetchine

I am pleased to say I find nothing funny, sir," Bent replied as they reached the bottom of the stairs. "I have no sense of humor whatsoever. None at all. It has been proven by phrenology. I have Nichtlachen-Keinwortz syndrome, which for some curious reason is considered a lamentable affliction. I, on the other hand, consider it a gift. I am happy to say that I regard the sight of a fat man slipping on a banana skin as nothing more than an unfortunate accident that highlights the need for care in the disposal of household waste." "Have you tried - " Moist began, but Bent held up a hand. "Please! I repeat, I do not regard it as a burden! And may I say it annoys me when people assume it is such! Do not feel impelled to try to make me laugh, sir! If I had no legs, would you try to make me run? I am quite happy, thank you!" He — Terry Pratchett

It is important not only to have the awareness and to feel impelled to become involved, it's important that there be a forum out there to which one can relate, an organization- a movement. — Angela Davis

He did not look up because he knew how senseless the landscape would appear. It takes energy to invest life with meaning, and at present this energy was lacking. He knew how things could stand bare, their essence having retreated on all sides to beyond the horizon, as if impelled by a sinister centrifugal force. — Paul Bowles

We were impelled to remain loyal for a while to the memory of Penny. It was a form of the old fashioned custom of going into mourning. It is not a question of going around with a long face. It is just a question of having a pause between the old and the new. No haste to find a substitute for the one who has given you love for years. Wait, and let fate provide the answer. — Derek Tangye

[On Oscar Wilde:]
If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
[Life Magazine, June 2, 1927] — Dorothy Parker

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation. — James A. Michener

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt. — Jerome K. Jerome

The most successful scientists are not the most talented. But they are the ones who are impelled by curiosity. They've got to know what the answer is — Arthur Leonard Schawlow

Dignity of position adds to dignity of character, as well as to dignity of carriage. Give us a proud position, and we are impelled to act up to it. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. — Herman Melville

How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism. — James Monroe

To be silent when we are impelled to utter words injurious to God or to our neighbour, is an act of virtue; but, to be silent in confessing our sins, is the ruin of the soul. — Alphonsus Liguori

Experience constantly proves that every man who has power is impelled to abuse it; he goes on till he is pulled up by some limits. Who would say it! virtue even has need of limits. — Baron De Montesquieu

She was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say? — Virginia Woolf

Every man who has power is impelled to abuse it. — Baron De Montesquieu

Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success. — George Eliot

Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered - at the decision-making levels, the levels of real power - an archaic waste of time. Well then, he would pursue the superfluous as an end in itself. He would be its champion, its defender and preserver. Who was it who'd said that all art was completely useless? Jimmy couldn't recall, but hooray for him, whoever he was. The more obsolete a book was, the more eagerly Jimmy would add it to his inner collection. — Margaret Atwood

A man feels impelled to do something to keep awake. — William Mulock

I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the world a better place than when you came into it. — Richard Eyre

No - the trampling, driving extravert, the one who always feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility. — Aldous Huxley

And there you are
on the shore,
fitful and thoughtful, trying
to attach them to an idea
some news of your own life.
But the lilies
are slippery and wild - they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest
spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you. — Mary Oliver

The drive behind life has lost none of its power; proof that, impelled by that drive, man can build as well as destroy; that in his nature is more of Vishnu the Creator than of Siva the Destroyer. — George Amos Dorsey

The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that? — Ethan Mordden

The young man, who intends no ill,
Believes that none is intended, and therefore
Acts with openness and candor: but his father, having suffered the injuries of fraud, is impelled to suspect, and too often allured to practice it. — Samuel Johnson

Centripetal force is the force by which bodies are drawn from all sides, are impelled, or in any way tend, toward some point as to a center. — Isaac Newton

We could express this power in the following way: Most of the time we live in an interior world of dreams, desires, and obsessive thoughts. But in this period of exceptional creativity, we are impelled by the need to get something done that has a practical effect. We force ourselves to step outside our inner chamber of habitual thoughts and connect to the world, to other people, to reality. Instead of flitting here and there in a state of perpetual distraction, our minds focus and penetrate to the core of something real. At these moments, it is as if our minds - turned outward - are now flooded with light from the world around us, and suddenly exposed to new details and ideas, we become more inspired and creative. — Robert Greene

Statutory regulations, legislative enactments, constitutional provisions, are invasive. They never yet induced man to do anything he could and would not do by virtue of his intellect or temperament, nor prevented anything that man was impelled to do by the same dictates. — Emma Goldman

Stillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined
a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time. — Max Frisch

O fire of love! Was it not enough for You to have created us to Your image and likeness, and to have recreated us in grace through the Blood of Your Son, without giving Yourself wholly to us as our Food, O God, Divine Essence? What impelled You to do this? Your charity alone. — St. Catherine Of Siena

What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it. — A.A. Milne

Do you know that she came here Monday afternoon and spent some hours in this house?" "Yes, I know." "Do you know what she came for?" "I know nothing definite. I have heard conjectures." "I won't ask you from whom or what. I am aware, Miss Duday, that in coming here this evening you people were impelled only partly by the threat of a legal action by Mrs. Jaffee. You also hoped to learn what Miss Eads came to see me for and what she said. I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. I have given a complete report to the police, or Mr. Goodwin has, and if they don't care to publish it neither do I. But I will ask you, do you know of any reason why, on Monday, Miss Eads should have decided to seek seclusion? Was she being harassed or frightened by anyone?" "On Monday?" "Yes. — Rex Stout

Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies' ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones. — Simon Winchester

It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who ... drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime. — Susan B. Anthony

Never strive, O artist, to create what you are not irresistibly impelled to create! — Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach

If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, it was bad theology. — Karen Armstrong

If God is everywhere, I had concluded, then He is in food. Therefore, the more I ate the godlier I would become. Impelled by this new religious fervor, I glutted myself like a fanatic. — Woody Allen

It is always thus, impelled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, we make our irrevocable decisions — Marcel Proust

Our subject is, you see, impelled towards the good by, paradoxically, being impelled towards evil. The intention to act violently is accompanied by strong feelings of physical distress. To counter these the subject has to switch to a diametrically opposed attitude. — Anthony Burgess

As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot's poems a bird sings, "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." I've always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now. — Ursula K. Le Guin

But if men are, on the one hand, irresistibly impelled towards what is for their profit, and if, on the other, they resist instinctively what is hurtful, we are forced to conclude that each nation carries in its bosom a natural force of expansion, and a not less natural force of resistance, which forces are equally injurious to all other nations; or, in other words, that antagonism and war are the natural state of human society. — Frederic Bastiat

While I value the good opinion of my fellow citizens as highly as anyone, I may be permitted to say that I am governed by higher considerations than either the favor or the fear of man. I am impelled to the course I have taken because I fear God. — Elijah Parish Lovejoy

Children get food shelter pocket money longholidays and love, all of it apparently free gratis, and most of the little fools think it's a sort of compensation for having been born. 'There are no strings on me!' They sang; but I, pinnoccio, saw the strings. Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness. — Salman Rushdie

In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we ARE life, our being fills us, in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe. — Peter Matthiessen

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Hamlet 's character is the prevalence of the abstracting and generalizing habit over the practical. He does not want courage, skill, will, or opportunity; but every incident sets him thinking; and it is curious, and at the same time strictly natural, that Hamlet, who all the play seems reason itself, should he impelled, at last, by mere accident to effect his object. I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about. — Lou Reed

The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'. — Richard Dawkins

Overhead, a Hawk was zeroing in on a watchbird. The armored murder machine had learned a lot in a few days. Its sole function was to kill. At present it was impelled toward a certain type of living organism, metallic like itself. But the Hawk had just discovered that there were other types of living organisms, too - Which had to be murdered. — Robert Sheckley

Idly, I flipped through the ledger's pages, for I cannot resist a book set before me no matter its kind. Writing draws my eye; I am impelled as by sorcery to read even if it is an accountant's list or a solicitor's instructions or, as here, nothing more than a record of travelers who have passed through this inn. — Kate Elliot

Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled-whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. — Harry Frankfurt

Compassion forms the essential bond between seeking God in meditation and all forms of social justice. For the more we are transformed in compassion, the more we are impelled to act with compassion toward others. — James Finley

We are living in a time of trouble and bewilderment, in a time when none of us can foresee or foretell the future. But surely it is in times like these, when so much that we cherish is threatened or in jeopardy, that we are impelled all the more to strengthen our inner resources, to turn to the things that have no news value because they will be the same to-morrow that they were to-day and yesterday - the things that last, the things that the wisest, the most farseeing of our race and kind have been inspired to utter in forms that can inspire ourselves in turn. — Laurence Binyon

Adolescence impelled her eyes to stay at an even keel, to deal with the ground before flickering to the heavens. Night became not dotted with fairy clouds of celestial brilliance, but simply the time when the sun was out of sight. — Thomm Quackenbush

All Being within this order, by the laws
of its own nature is impelled to find
its proper station round its Primal Cause.
Thus every nature moves across the tide
of the great sea of being to its own port,
each with its given instinct as its guide. — Dante Alighieri

Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

When in our isolation we see our lives seeping away as a mere succession of moments, tossed meaninglessly about by accidents and overwhelming events; when we contemplate a history that seems to be at an end, leaving only chaos behind it, then we are impelled to raise ourselves above history. — Karl Jaspers

All life is an experiment. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment. I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom. Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life? — Charles Dickens

If racism can't be shown to be natural then it is the result of certain conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions. — Howard Zinn

The human being is a surprisingly resilient organism. We are impelled toward health not sickness. Your spirit, as surely as your body, will try to heal ... So you should not fear tragedy and suffering. Like love, they make you more a part of the human family. From them can come your greatest creativity. They are the fire that burns you pure. — Kent Nerburn

Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us. — Madeleine L'Engle

Flowers, cold from the dew,
And autumn's approaching breath,
I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,
Which haven't faded yet.
In their nights, fragrantly resinous,
Entwined with delightful mystery,
They will breathe in her springlike
Extraordinary beauty.
But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,
From her shing head they will flutter
And fall-and before her
They will die, faintly fragrant still.
And, impelled by faithful longing,
My obedient gaze will feast upon them-
With a reverent hand,
Love will gather their rotting remains. — Anna Akhmatova

My life is pretty well at peace, and the profession is more of an avocation. It's a calling, if you like, rather than a job. I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. — Jonas Salk

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king. — Johann Joachim Becher

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. — Aldous Huxley

Faith always contains an element of risk, of venture; and we are impelled to make the venture by the affinity and attraction which we feel in ourselves. — Dean Inge

wondered what had become of Marcus Brutus's wife, Portia. She had ardently espoused the Republican cause and encouraged her husband in the course he had taken. The day after we heard news of my father's funeral, word came of her fate. Often when a man is impelled by honor to take his own life, his wife will do the same. And so Portia did, most painfully, jamming a hot coal down her throat. — Phyllis T. Smith

An effort impelled by desire must also have an automatic or subconscious energy to aid its realization. — Man Ray

I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them. — Gwendolyn Brooks

The common man is impelled and controlled by interests; the superior, by ideas. — John Lancaster Spalding

I think both science and art are impelled by curiosity: What's really happening? How do things really function? How can I really engage with the world around me? These are questions that artists and scientists both ask. — Amy Hardie

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it. — Morrissey

Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practised it through the ages. — John Steinbeck

History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma — Aldous Huxley

Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake. — Jonathan Franzen

The expansionary operations of the Second Bank of the United States, coupled with its laxity toward insisting on specie payment by the state banks, impelled a further inflationary expansion of state banks on top of the spectacular enlargement of the central bank. Thus, the number of incorporated state banks rose from 232 in 1816 to 338 in 1818. — Murray Rothbard

[We are not] to take one step, even in the direction of what is good, beyond that to which we are irresistibly impelled by God, and this applies to action, word, and thought. — Simone Weil

The love of solitude, when cultivated in the morn of life, elevates the mind to a noble independence, but to acquire the advantages which solitude is capable of affording, the mind must not be impelled to it by melancholy and discontent, but by a real distaste to the idle pleasures of the world, a rational contempt for the deceitful joys of life, and just apprehensions of being corrupted and seduced by its insinuating and destructive gayeties. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

The pathologized images have moved the soul in several ways: we are afraid; we feel vulnerable and in danger; our very physical sustance and sanity appear to be menaced; we want to prevent or rectify. Especially this last seizes us. We feel protective, impelled to correct, straighten, repair. For we have confused something sick with something wrong. [ ... ]
affliction reaches us partly through the guilt it brings. Guilt belongs to the experiences of deviation, the the sense of being off, failing, 'missing the mark'. [ ... ]
However the true missing of the mark is taking the guilt literally, where failings becomes faults to be set right. This places the guilt on the shoulders of the ego who 'should not' have failed. Then pathologizing reinforces the ego's style and guilt serves a secondary gain, increasing the ego's sense of importance: ego becomes superego, drivenly busy with repairing wrongs. A guilty ego is no less egocentric than a proud one. — James Hillman

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater policy, concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. — Jane Austen

The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control. — Abraham Lincoln

If we truly worship God, acknowledging and adoring his infinite worth, we find ourselves impelled to make him known to others, in order that they may worship him too. Thus worship leads to witness, and witness in its turn to worship, in a perpetual circle. — John Stott

I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs. — Sarah Hall

If I had been straight, I would have been an entirely different person. I would never have turned toward writing with a burning desire to confess, to understand, to justify myself in the eyes of others ... I wouldn't have been impelled to live in New York and choose the hard poverty of bohemia over the soft comfort of the business world. — Edmund White

Right. Vampires. But how do they get inside?"
"They fly" ...
"We dont fly," Clary felt impelled to point out.
"No," Jace agreed. "We dont fly. We break and enter." ...
"Flying sounds like more fun."
-Clary & Jace, pg.258- — Cassandra Clare

At times, the most dangerous politicians have been those impelled by dreams and ideals, rather than basic realities. — Clarence H. Burns

As an individual, I myself feel impelled to fancy ... a limitless succession of Universes ... Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God. — Edgar Allan Poe

I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come. — Karl Jaspers

Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age. — Wassily Kandinsky

Surely those who know the great passionate heart of Jehovah must deny their own loves to share in the expression of His. Consider the call from the Throne above, "Go ye," and from round about, "Come over and help us," and even the call from the damned souls below, "Send Lazarus to my brothers, that they come not to this place." Impelled, then, by these voices, I dare not stay home while Quichuas perish. So what if the well-fed church in the homeland needs stirring? They have the Scriptures, Moses, and the Prophets, and a whole lot more. Their condemnation is written on their bank books and in the dust on their Bible covers. American believers have sold their lives to the service of Mammon, and God has His rightful way of dealing with those who succumb to the spirit of Laodicea. — Jim Elliot

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring. — Berenice Abbott

That sentiment had been the driving force behind humanity's progress across the ages, a simple imperative fueled by our innate curiosity: to discover what was around the next bend, over the next horizon. It was that same inquisitiveness that impelled us to explore who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed next. Gray — James Rollins

Every thing was to take its natural course, however, neither impelled nor assisted. — Jane Austen

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there. — Charles Dickens

Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important ... [I]t is summed up in that short but imperious word ought, so full of high significance. It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause. — Charles Darwin

This is treachery, to change faith in accord with shifting fortune. The justice of my cause impelled me to withstand even adverse circumstance. — Ulrich Von Hutten

You all know the reasons which have impelled me to renounce the throne. But I want you to understand that in making up my mind I did not forget the country or the empire, which, as Prince of Wales and lately as King, I have for twenty-five years tried to serve. — Edward VIII