A Quote by Nikola Tesla

Love: I recognize the emotion for what it is, an irrational self-destructive impulse, which is disguised as joy.

Nikola Tesla

Quote Topics

Destructive Disguised Emotion Impulse Irrational Joy Love Recognize Self Self-Destructive Which

Quote Author

Nikola Tesla
American - Inventor
July 10, 1856 - January 7, 1943

I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

Thom Gunn

Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.

Millicent Fenwick

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act. The root meaning of the word emotion, remember, is "to move.

Daniel Goleman

Joy is the characteristic by which God uses us to re-make the distressing into the desired, the discarded into the creative. Joy is prayer-Joy is strength-Joy is love-Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Mother Teresa

The Holy Spirit gives us joy. And he is joy. Joy is the gift in which all the other gifts are included. It is the expression of happiness, of being in harmony with ourselves, that which can only come from being in harmony with God and with his creation. It belongs to the nature of joy to be radiant; it must communicate itself. The missionary spirit of the Church is none other than the impulse to communicate the joy which has been given.

Pope Benedict XVI

Love is a many-sided sacrifice; it means thoughtfulness for others; it means putting their good before self-gratification. Love is impulse, no doubt, but true love is impulse wisely directed.

Hugh Reginald Haweis

I do not comprehend those rules of conduct that make us so content with self and so cold to those we love. I detest prudence, I even hate (suffer me to say so) those duties of friendship which substitute propriety for interest, and circumspection for feeling. How shall I say it? I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.

Jeanne Julie Eleonore de Lespinasse

In order to meaningfully repent of the ways in which we violate love, we must recognize them. We won’t recognize self-protective patterns of relating as sinful violations of love until we face the disappointment in our soul we’re determined never to experience again.

Larry Crabb

Even our concepts about romantic love, I think, are destructive; treating people as property is destructive; being jealous of other people is destructive. You know, being jealous is a perfectly natural thing to feel, so it's not about suppressing jealousy, but learning to come to terms with it and to recognize its destructiveness and then to transform it.

Jeff Mangum

De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.

Saul Bellow

I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces.

Paul Tillich

I think we all carry the seeds of our own destruction. You really have to be aware that just because something is good, it doesn't mean it's not going to trigger a self-destructive impulse.

Adam Ferrara

When you awaken to what I call the Authentic Self, which is the spiritual or evolutionary impulse, what begins to emerge is the dawning recognition of the fact that each one of us, at our highest level, is that Authentic Self, which is actually the same energy and intelligence that originally inspired the entire creative process. You begin to intuit and feel directly connected to the very impulse that initiated the whole event fourteen billion years ago and is driving it right now.

Andrew Cohen

Nothing in oratory is more important than to win for the orator the favour of his hearer, and to have the latter so affected as to be swayed by something resembling an impulse of the spirit impetu quodam animi or emotion perturbatione, rather than by judgment or deliberation. For men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or lust, or rage, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or fear, or illusion, or some other inward emotion aliqua permotione mentis, than by reality or authority, or any legal standard, or judicial precedent or statute.