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Compulsion   /kəmpˈəlʃən/   Listen
Compulsion

noun
1.
An urge to do or say something that might be better left undone or unsaid.  Synonym: irresistible impulse.
2.
An irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions, even against your will.  Synonym: obsession.
3.
Using force to cause something to occur.  Synonym: coercion.  "They didn't have to use coercion"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Compulsion" Quotes from Famous Books



... watched the mists of morning as they soared into the air. Reluctantly, with imperceptible movement, they detached themselves from their watery home; they clambered aloft in spectral companies, drawn skyward, as by some beckoning hand, under the stealthy compulsion of the sun. They crept against the tawny precipices, clinging to their pinnacles like shreds of pallid gauze, and nestling demurely among dank clefts where something of the mystery of night still lingered. It was a procession of dainty shapes wreathing themselves ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... not like that condescending compulsion, and now out of danger, I became strangely embarrassed and angry in her presence. The "mastiff" epithet stuck like a barb in my boyish chivalry. Was it the wind, or a low sigh, or a silent weeping, that I heard? I longed to know, but would not turn my head, and my companion was lagging ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... twice as rapidly as ever.... I have no anxiety about anything but the policy which is to prevail in victory.... It is frightful to me to hear President Lincoln avow that (against the morality of his heart) his official duty is to do nothing for the coloured race except under compulsion and to save the whole Republic from foundering. He knows they are subjects of the Union, and owe allegiance to it, to the point of laying down their lives for it; yet he does not know that those ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... desperate indeed, will heal at the last for no other reason than that they must. The inexorable compulsion of all things is towards health or destruction, life or death, and we hasten our joys or our woes to the logical extreme. It is urgent, therefore, that we be joyous if we wish to live. Our heads may be as solid as is possible, but our hearts and our ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... sex-consciousness in our society has grown abnormal and overpowering. There is no actual objection to this in itself, for it offers a stimulus, acting in the depth of life, which leads to creative exuberance. But a great deal of it is a forced growth of compulsion bearing seeds of degradation. In those ages when men acknowledged spiritual perfection to be their object, women were denounced as the chief obstacle in their way. The constant and conscious exercise of allurements, which ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore


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