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Irresistible impulse   /ˌɪrɪzˈɪstəbəl ˈɪmpəls/   Listen
Irresistible impulse

noun
1.
An urge to do or say something that might be better left undone or unsaid.  Synonym: compulsion.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Irresistible impulse" Quotes from Famous Books



... the delight of being near her. He had no heart to walk in any other direction. If he strolled out in the morning, or in the quiet of the evening, he proceeded almost instinctively towards the manse; and if he passed any distance beyond it, an irresistible impulse caused him ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... Foster's mind. The man might be dying of his wounds. He spoke to him again in French and Spanish, but still got no reply! Then he listened intently for his breathing, but all was as silent as the tomb. With an irresistible impulse, yet instinctive shudder, he laid his hand on the man and passed it up until it reached the face. The silence was then explained. The face was growing cold ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne

... with. He was glad he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world. Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape, by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... to do so. For every one has felt, that when a paroxysm of laughter has seized him at a misbecoming time and place, the efforts which he made to suppress it, nay, the very sense of the impropriety of giving way to it, tend only to augment and prolong the irresistible impulse. ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... strolled farther than usual, tempted by the tranquil beauty around us, and during that walk I had been strangely, wonderfully happy. Many times, as we walked silently side by side, a strong, an almost irresistible impulse seemed to force me to utter those three passionate words that have caused a flutter in the heart-beat of so many thousands since the world began; and as many times the reverence I felt for her, and the diffidence arising from it, held me back, and the words remained ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various


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