Driven Behavior Quotes

I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire. They don't walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives ... for no reason.

The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past.

I am lazy, but for some reason, I am so paranoid that I end up working hard.

We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to.

Humans seem to be programmed to think of ambivalent feelings at the same time. That is the driving force behind human beings: to be the warrant of all things and to control other worlds.

A lot of stuff I do out of pure obsessiveness.

I have to work, for my soul.

In real life, I don't love working out, but I've been driven to it.

I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother.

Every time I find myself stressed out, it's because I do things primarily driven by growth.

There are men who are possessed by an urge so strong to do some particular thing that they can't help themselves, they've got to do it. They're prepared to sacrifice everything to satisfy their yearning.

I think drug addicts have brains wired like adventurers and they didn't get the opportunity to find it. You know, the people I get to work with - not all of them are well-adjusted. Some of them are driven by heavy demons.

Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes.

Narratively speaking, innocent misunderstandings are disappointing. Arbitrary events are also disappointing. The stories that really grab our attention involve not accidents but people doing things on purpose - to get things they desperately want.

Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will, to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on.

Man is primarily governed by passion and instinct.

Ambition interests me because it's such a surefire indicator of damage.

Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action. If you know these things abut a person, you can touch him at the core of his being.

It's an ugly thing to see ambition and to see people satisfying themselves.

I'm competing with everyone, but it's okay because they're not aware. I can't shut that impulse off. And I'm glad, because that impulse keeps me on the treadmill. If I didn't have it, I would be like, "Great! Ten minutes! I'm good." But if I'm competing, I can see what level someone's on and I can top it.

People are not to be driven and you can put into a gnat’s eye all the souls of the children of men that are driven into heaven by preaching hell-fire.

The self is like a pimping blackmailing chauffeur who gets you from here to there on word lines.

Though ambition may be a fault in itself, it is often the mother of virtues.

My whole history of being an actor is unusual and slightly disgraceful because it should be something you burn to do.