Tension Quotes

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension. (Norman Mailer)
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it. View quote
Woody Allen
If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn't ask me, I'd still have to say it. View quote
George Burns
In film producing, there is an inherent tension between the director, the money and the producer, and that's what keeps it flowing and honest and accountable. View quote
Christine Vachon
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. View quote
Viktor Frankl
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right. View quote
Ellen Goodman
We who in engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes. View quote
William Landay
People are learning to feel more comfortable hearing one another's dreams. It used to be that if you told a dream in public, someone had to make a joke to relieve the tension introduced by that alternative reality. View quote
Henry Reed
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me. (Marilyn Hacker)
Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light... We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think."..., but I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness. View quote
James Thurber
Washington's adventuristic policy, whipping up international tension to the utmost, is pushing mankind towards nuclear catastrophe. View quote
Konstantin Chernenko
The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action. View quote
Graham Greene
A warrior of the light never confuses tension with anxiety. View quote
Paulo Coelho
I'm in this band to give volume to various struggles throughout the world. To me, the tension in this band is a minimal sacrifice. View quote
Zack de la Rocha
I'm interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think it's the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really can't be this way. View quote
Roy Lichtenstein
We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work. View quote
William Gibson
I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction. (Emil Cioran)
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. View quote
Emil Cioran
Music moves us because it serves as a metaphor for emotional life. It has peaks and valleys of tension and release. It mimics the dynamics of our emotional life. View quote
Daniel Levitin
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. View quote
John le Carré
The product of movement and counter-movement is tension. When tension - working strength - is expressed, it endows the work of art with the living effect of coordinated, though opposing, forces. View quote
Hans Hofmann