Inclination Quotes

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. (Reinhold Niebuhr)
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. View quote
Charles Baudelaire
In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
In effect, to follow, not to force the public inclination; to give a direction, a form, a technical dress, and a specific sanction, to the general sense of the community, is the true end of legislature. View quote
Edmund Burke
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good. View quote
Samuel Johnson
What I mean by living to one's-self is living in the world, as in it, not of it it is as if no one know there was such a person, and you wished no one to know it it is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things, not an object of attention or curiosity in it to take a thoughtful, anxious interest in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it. View quote
William Hazlitt
Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you. View quote
Samuel Johnson
I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values. View quote
Luis Barragán
I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
The inclination to believe in the fantastic may strike some as a failure in logic, or gullibility, but it's really a gift. A world that might have Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster is clearly superior to one that definitely does not. View quote
Chris Van Allsburg
I adore clothes, I adore drinking. I just don't have the time or the inclination to totally indulge in it. (Christine Baranski)
Sometimes, as is the case of peach and plum trees, which are often dwarfed, the plants are thrown into a flowering states, and then, as they flower freely year after year, they have little inclination to make vigorous growth. View quote
Robert Fortune
We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction. View quote
Rachel Carson
Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice. View quote
George Eliot
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life. View quote
H. P. Lovecraft
There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity. View quote
Antonin Artaud
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue. View quote
Emil Cioran
I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination... Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee. View quote
Jimmy Carter
Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is more or less strong tendency ordered to an intrinsic moral evil, and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. View quote
Pope Benedict XVI
I was given the freedom to discover my own inclination and talents, to fashion my inmost pleasures and sorrows myself and to regard the future not as an alien higher power but as the hope and product of my own strength. (Hermann Hesse)
Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. View quote
Alasdair MacIntyre
When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before. View quote
Billy Corgan
The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife. View quote
Democritus
Remembering... that Eratosthenes of Cyrene, employing mathematical theories and geometrical methods, discovered from the course of the sun, the shadows cast by an equinoctial gnomon, and the inclination of the heaven that the circumference of the earth is two hundred and fifty-two thousand stadia, that is, thirty-one million five hundred thousand paces. View quote
Vitruvius