irrational impulse


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Noun1.irrational impulse - a strong spontaneous and irrational motivation; "his first impulse was to denounce them"; "the urge to find out got him into trouble"
irrational motive - a motivation that is inconsistent with reason or logic
compulsion, irresistible impulse - an urge to do or say something that might be better left undone or unsaid; "he felt a compulsion to babble on about the accident"
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
References in classic literature ?
'But the truth being that he was my best protector and friend, and did me more good than all the masters put together, an irrational impulse seized me to pick him up, or go down with him.'
But instead of hurrying ahead, I felt an irrational impulse to listen to the man.
Woolf's novel suggests that an irrational impulse must be incorporated into the formal arrangement of the genre that reflects an evolving and modernist subjectivity.
It's as if they think some irrational impulse this weekend led almost one third of the electorate to vote for the National Front (FN) in regional polls.
Goodwin certainly wouldn't have been the first one forced to admit that an irrational impulse had caused him to do something he later regretted.
Do not yield to some wild, irrational impulse to venture out of your house, even for an instant.
This may result in you waking up in the hour before the dawn with an irrational impulse to get married.
Indeed, the behavior of guests and staff is often seen as so grotesque that the piece achieves a visionary intensity: one soon understands that this is a description of Hell as resort hotel, a morality tale of greed, callousness, irrational impulse and majestic disregard for hygiene, which wonderfully illuminates the vilest in us all without for a moment losing its credibility as the absolute truth or its effectiveness as a sort of cautionary example.
They are mere complicit pawns in the pursuit of what Freud may call delayed gratification of a state's ego and irrational impulses at literally an immeasurable financial and human cost.
If you are willing to face and take responsibility for your ego's self-centred motives, conditioned responses, and often irrational impulses to such a degree that you are able to choose not to act on them, they might as well not exist.
But this is not a novel about what motivates irrational impulses; this is a novel about Hank's escape from his old life and toward something new--a new life that is still defined by connections to the past in the form of his college best friend, Cesar Lobos de Madrid, a fair-skinned Mexican soccer playing God who is "rich, good-looking, [a] star athlete with just enough Latin lilt in his voice to, in the words of a female classmate, 'make a lady cross her legs' [with] something more to his personality, something less tangible, something magnetic," and who, like other men who have historically shared the name "Cesar," is also a bit of a megalomaniac with a dangerous side.
The time between the beginning of the war and Pierre's sudden decision to go to the army is filled with an abrupt change of spiritual states and irrational impulses. Due to the discrete nature of the narrative, the fragmentary episodes in which Pierre appears, it is as if during his absence in the text something in him matures.