Famous quotes containing the words recoil, energy and/or impulse:
“A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate”
—Christopher Hampton (b. 1946)
“What is desire?—
The impulse to make someone else complete?
That woman would set sodden straw on fire.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)