Emotional Impulses Quotes

Nothing is more fallacious than to expect to produce any valuable or permanent results in political projects by relying merely on the reason of men. Men are ... for the most part governed by the impulses of passion.

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions.

In Quebec, people are moved too often by passion and too little by intelligence.

If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.

Dreams seem to be spurred on not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what complicated tricks my reason has played sometimes in dreams.

The heart wants what the heart wants," she says, somewhat cryptically. I purse my lips in disapproval. "You'd think the heart would know better.

The fact that a man is driven back on feelings and instincts to justify an action or course of action which he has thought over and discussed, is good evidence that what he calls his feelings and instincts are at variance with his better judgment … and may therefore be worthless or dangerous guides in any wider matter involving the fate of his country or his fellow-countrymen.

Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.

When did reason ever direct our desires or our fears?

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.

Man is a mixture of desires that extend beyond his knowledge and often result in action conflicting with rationality.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

People unconsciously want to reveal their inner urges.

There are so many different desires that make you execute an artwork.

Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.

The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy.

No woman dares to refuse love without a motive, for nothing is more natural than to yield to love.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

The mind is always the patsy of the heart.

Rationality is an achievement that can be undone at any moment.

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

Regardless of the magnitude of the decision, our brains make it hard for us to keep the perspective we need to make good choices.