Tension Quotes

The greater the tension, the greater is the potential.

There are a lot of polls that show that actually Americans have a pretty high opinion of teachers, that Americans think teachers are just about as prestigious as doctors. And yet there's this political conversation - this reform conversation - that paints a very negative picture of the effectiveness of the teaching population. So there's definitely a tension between the way teaching is talked about and understood at the political level and how everyday average Americans think about teachers.

When there is tension, arguments and money problems, it's tough to do your work. Some people thrive on that. I don't.

One of things I write about a lot is the role of women. An older friend of mine said that she feels like there's always a tension between wanting to be free and wanting to be cherished. I think that's one of the things that my whole book speaks to, wanting to break out of the confines of the roles that are prescribed for women and yet at the same time, not wanting to be totally free. You want to have intimate relationships. It's that bursting out of confinement.

Tension is the great integrity.

When we give ourselves the chance to let go of all our tension, the body's natural capacity to heal itself can begin to work.

A tension or difficulty can signal the approach of a new grace of God. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

Putting a little time aside for clean fun and good humor is very necessary to relieve the tensions of our time.

When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another.

As inequality grows, the basic bonds of social fraternity are fraying - as we discussed in regard to Occupy Wall Street. As tensions increase, people will become more willing to engage in protest. But that moment is not now.

There's a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it's driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it's a tension that I think I feed off.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

I understood that the teacher was not eing dismissive, that the problem would be addressed. But, without extra upset. A noncombative response, the Buddha taught, assures that pain does not become suffering. And, unclouded by the tension of struggle, the mind is able to assess clearly and respond wisely.

If someone was to introduce hope and idealism into our political system, I think the tension that would create in other areas would certainly be ripe. You would think that if you bring oxygen to the organism, the organism lives. But there may be other organisms in there that thrive in darkness and in a more anaerobic environment. Watching those creatures writhe will always be interesting.

But lately, when I’m drunk, I feel a hostility that I’ve never known before. It is a tension deep in my gut that makes me want to yell until my face is red, knock over glasses with the back of my hand, and kick people I don’t know in the shins.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

The tension between the call to the desert and to the market place arises not from the greater presence of God in one or the other but from our varying psychological needs to apprehend him in different ways.

The walk is like a matrix, like a diffuse, vague happening. It's like - imagine a play, a work of theatre, that is totally vague, almost devoid of details that consists in one person going on a walk. And as a consequence, there is a necessary tension between the determinacy and indeterminacy, the definite and the indefinite, of possibility.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

Why should I be feeling tension? It's The Daily Show.

It really helps if you've got something like cycling, walking, running or swimming that can let your body release all that tension and keep your muscles fit.

R.G. Belsky's thought-provoking thriller, The Kennedy Connection, introduces us to a smart, witty, and human hero whose quest to find answers about two crimes - one famous, one all but unnoticed - is loaded with tension and full of unexpected twists and turns. I loved The Kennedy Connection, and can't wait for the next Gil Malloy novel.

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.

Many writers struggle with exposition in their novels. Often they heap it on in large chunks of straight narrative. Back story – what happens before the novel opens – is especially troublesome. How can we give the essentials and avoid a mere information drop? Use dialogue. First, create a tension-filled scene, usually between two characters. Get them arguing, confronting each other. Then you can have the information appear in the natural course of things.

Total relaxation is the ultimate. That's the moment when one becomes a buddha. That is the moment of realization, enlightenment, christ-consciousness. You cannot be totally relaxed right now. At the innermost core a tension will persist.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

I think there is no one answer. It is still a struggle, there are tensions and I'm sure there are many people who would like to see these questions laid to rest or cease to be posed altogether.

Be it caste or communal violence, they stall the growth of the nation. Let us affirm that we will be free from these tensions.

Everyone has a special place they store their tension (I'm on shiatsu duty), the same way everyone misspells the same words over and over. Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscles, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

The snowy owl has eyes that look just like mine, especially when it widens them. And while I stand there, staring at it, lowering my sunglasses, something unspoken passes between me and the bird - there's this weird kind of tension, a bizarre pressure, that fuels the following, which starts, happens, ends, very quickly.

Clifford paints true-to-life characters with the same gritty touch as the best of Dennis Lehane. Straightforward and edgy, Lamentation gnaws with nail-biting tension on every page. A must-read for contemporary hardboiled mystery fans who appreciate the type of terse dialogue and real life conflicts and settings Elmore Leonard so richly brought to life.

What has happened to our ability to dwell in the unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting.

If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.

There is something about dance that is actually a great tension. There is something that is incredibly freeing about dancing for dancers who do it. They tend to be really arty and interesting people in real life. At the same time, they have an incredibly rigorous training schedule.

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.

Life is a series of pulls back and forth... A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. Most of us live somewhere in the middle. A wrestling match...Which side win? Love wins. Love always wins

Great work is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it.

The tension of a mysterious danger is even more unbearable than danger itself. People hate the vacuum of an unknown situation. They want security. They even prefer war to the insecure expectation of a war with its threat of enemy surprise. This vague fearful expectation acts on their fantasies. They anticipate all kinds of mysterious dangers; they begin to provoke them. It is the evocation of fear and danger in order to escape the tension of insecurity.

Think about how many of us have wondered why we don't fit, why our faith doesn't stabilize us, why we seem so out of sync with most of the world. Genuine faith is the isolating force in our lives that creates tension wherever we go. To put it another way, faith is the unbalancing force in our lives that is the fruit of God's disturbing presence.

Since neither black animosity nor the Left's falsehood of 'racial tensions' is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks' perceptions or the leftist libel.

For a quick lap at the Nrburgring, you've probably experienced more in seven minutes...than most people have experienced in all their life in the way of fear, in the way of tension, in the way of animosity towards machinery and to a racetrack.

The world was created because God willed it, but why did He will it? Judaism has maintained, in all of its versions, that this world is the arena that God created for man, half beast and half angel; to prove that he could be a moral being...man was given dominion over nature, but he was commanded to behave towards the rest of creation with justice and compassion. Man lives, always, in tension between his power and the limits set by his conscience.

In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God's children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individuals and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action

When people really hate one another, the tension within them can sometimes make itself felt throughout a room, like atmospheric waves, first hot, then cold, wafted backwards and forwards as if in an invisible process of air conditioning, creating a pervasive physical disturbance.

What is true, and I think that we can't deny it, is that some of the same concerns about globalization, about technology, rapid social change that were reflected in Brexit, that's been reflected in some of the debates in Germany and France and other places, that those exist in the United States as well. My view is that over the long term, over the next 10, 15, 20 years, if we are able to address the legitimate economic concerns of those who feel left behind by globalization, then many of these tensions will be reduced. And we will see a world that is less divided.