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Tension Quotes

Tension Quotes by Mahmoud Darwish, Amanda Seyfried, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mike Flanagan, Paul Brunton, Arthur Levitt and many others.

For the Arabs in Israel there is always a tension between nationality and identity.
Mahmoud Darwish
I have realized that I hate going to the premieres of the movies that I’m in. Because I feel this tension after the movie is over that everyone feels obligated to say something nice to you. It’s so unnatural and uncomfortable.
Amanda Seyfried
Happiness is the relief after extreme tension
F. Scott Fitzgerald
There’s nothing scarier than silence. A lot of horror movies lean on hits and score to try and create tension, which actually does the opposite. The best scares come from a desire to see the character overcome what they’re dealing with in the scene. If you care about the character you’ll care about the scare.
Mike Flanagan
This withdrawal from the day’s turmoil into creative silence is not a luxury, a fad, or a futility. It dissolves mental tensions and heals negative emotions.
Paul Brunton
The tension between centrality, on the one hand, and competition, on the other, is probably the oldest of all market structure issues.
Arthur Levitt
Iranian nuclear policy is transparent, and we have opened our facilities to United Nations inspectors. However, we will not abandon the great achievements of Iranian scientists. I too will not suspend uranium enrichment. However, I will attempt to avoid unnecessary tensions. We have a right to enrich uranium.
Mir-Hossein Mousavi
Tension is the greatest curse in sport. I’ve never had any tension. You give the best you have – you win or lose. What’s the difference if you give all you’ve got to give?
Chief Bender
It’s about finding meaning through light. I’m always interested in tensions. A primary one is the collision between the familiar and the strange.
Gregory Crewdson
I was never a big fan of horror. I got into it making these films, but I don’t ever see myself doing slasher movies. The kind of horror film I like is ‘The Shining.’ I don’t really like slashers, but I love thrillers with tension.
Caity Lotz
People don’t realise how much tension they hold in their forearms.
Winona Ryder
Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.
Anais Nin
Sometimes the hardest thing to do in a pressure situation is to allow the tension to persist. The temptation is to make a decision, any decision, even if it is an inferior choice.
Garry Kasparov
Putting a little time aside for clean fun and good humor is very necessary to relieve the tensions of our time.
Hattie McDaniel
The secret at the heart of ‘The Memory Keeper’s Daughter’ is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.
Kim Edwards
When something explosive is kept hidden away, a tension builds within that must ultimately be released.
Orhan Pamuk
If you’ve developed an ideology that what’s good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that’s quite wonderful because there’s no moral tension.
Chrystia Freeland
When time, money, and results are on the line, it’s easy for tension to build.
Jason Fried
The act of writing can be a form of release – a confession performs the same action: putting your inner life on the page or into the hands of a trusted person releases tensions and sheds light on what often seems hidden until spoken – or written.
Connie Nielsen
I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.
Antonin Scalia
In each verse, a decision awaits us, and we can’t choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.
Octavio Paz
Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.
John Green
I’m in my usual state up here in the commentary box: high tension, heart beating like a trip hammer, whatever that is.
Murray Walker
Interactive management requires open, honest, and tension-free relationships with others. You do this by negotiating relationships and sharing, so that everybody wins.
Tony Alessandra
Vions are born in the soul of a man or woman who is consumed with the tension between what is and what could be.
Andy Stanley
On first listening, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Court And Spark,’ the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.
Jon Landau
Music can be so manipulating – especially in terms of horror. It’s such an important part of building the tension.
Avey Tare
In editing, it’s amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It’s amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.
Sean Durkin
My driver Kellie Frost and I would race these fellows home and they were always faster on the highway. We did the same with Daniel and his driver, and thus began a long series of jokes and competitions to alleviate the impossible hours and tensions this film provoked.
Madeleine Stowe
There is no life without work, anxieties or tensions. Peace is not found in avoiding these but in understanding them and controlling their force.
Wendy Beckett
The tension between Jews and Arabs tears us apart.
Benny Gantz
A great artist… must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I find comedy to be really scary, because it can go so wrong so easily, and the margin for error is so huge – and I guess that’s what makes it funny, that tension.
Tatiana Maslany
It’s really important we stay in touch with our customers and try to, over time, have more packages and flexibility than perhaps we have historically offered. And that’s part of that tension that is healthy that is going on in the marketplace.
Brian L. Roberts
I think that in order for anything to work on television, you have to have conflict. Nothing can be too happy or it’s boring. People don’t want to watch that – they want to watch things that are exciting and dangerous and sexy and have tension.
Carrie Preston
Laughter is the best way to release tensions and fears.
Dick Gregory
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
John W. Gardner
Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It’s also where the comedy is, which I’m interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.
Lorrie Moore
The ‘Moonlighting’ tension of the couple that obviously never can get together, there’s an innate sort of fun and tension in that.
Jason Katims
There’s a great deal of tension between so many kind of distinctive and restrictive female archetypes and images in the world. When you play with the archetypes, you get free.
Roisin Murphy
For all the drama we all have with our families and all the tension and hostility, I couldn’t have done this without my family. Being the people that they are – they’re crazy – made it possible for me to be crazy and to live a lifestyle of my own design.
Dan Colen
It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.
W. Somerset Maugham
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
Lorrie Moore
The philosophy of life is this: Life is not a struggle, not a tension… Life is bliss. It is eternal wisdom, eternal existence.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
I don’t think things are getting more insane. I do know that the country is more divided than it’s ever been. Tensions in America are at their peak.
Trevor Noah
Black children, white children, Latino children. America is becoming more diverse, it’s becoming more tolerant as a consequence there’s more interactions between groups. There are going be tensions that arise.
Barack Obama
At the end of the day, we get to be parents, greeting our lovely, crazy children and talking about their day, making sure they brush their teeth, so all the tension from our day is tabled… until the next.
Brad Pitt
I’m not that worried about war. Insecurity is the word I would use – insecurity and tension and conflict. I thought civilized people had abandoned wars. Sometimes people don’t make rational decisions.
Mohammad Javad Zarif
Contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.
Ron Paul
What keeps readers turning pages is suspense, which you can create using a variety of techniques, including tension, pacing and foreshadowing.
Leigh Michaels
If comedy is about surprises, about tension, there’s a lot of tension and surprise there, in the fact that people are expecting this to be natural.
Bo Burnham
There is a tension in relationships between wanting to return to the womb, but also wanting to be free. Because sometimes the woman’s attentions can be overly maternal, and you want to go, ‘Ahhhh!’
Ralph Fiennes
The tensions between authority and the people need to be heard, especially when they are suffering and they can’t eat.
Ralph Fiennes
There’s a famous tension between Green Lantern and Green Arrow in the comic books. Those guys have always been friends. They started off as not on the same page, and then they quickly became best friends.
Geoff Johns
Soup puts the heart at ease, calms down the violence of hunger, eliminates the tension of the day, and awakens and refines the appetite.
Auguste Escoffier
In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
Tom Stoppard
I always look at these superhero films, and I see people hurdling towards at a hundred miles per hour, and then they get up, shake their head, and charge back at a hundred miles per hour. Nobody seems to really get injured or hurt. I don’t find any threat in that. There is no tension in that whatsoever.
Martin Campbell
You translate everything-whether physical, mental, or spiritual into muscular tension.
F. Matthias Alexander
Donald Trump tests the limits of campaign speech. He makes false statements and refuses to correct them. He attacks other religions and ethnic groups, inflaming domestic tension and foreign terrorist rage.
David Ignatius
There’s always that little bit of tension that happens when you make a joke, especially when there’s a language barrier.
Desi Lydic
I think the violence in ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and ‘High Tension’ is much more traumatic than ‘Piranha.’
Alexandre Aja
On the field, you have to be aggressive; you’re thinking how to get the better of a situation. It’s not that I don’t laugh on the field. In fact, I think it’s very important to laugh, especially when you are angry and aggressive, to just take the tension away, make the moment go away.
Yuvraj Singh
We all read news stories about the difficulties and tensions that the United States has with our allies and even with coalition partners in Iraq, but we rarely read about the good news.
Mike Simpson
Sports like baseball or baseball are easy to dramatise, because all of them have a pause and that helps with the tension. Football never stops. I’m a football fan. I believe in the beauty of the game.
Carlos Cuaron
The pressure we put on ourselves to produce this perfect… operatic… version of ourselves really puts an inordinate amount of stress and tension on us.
Shefali Tsabary
Telling takes away the need to write. It relieves the pressure. And once that tension dissipates, so does the need to relieve it. First write it, then we’ll talk about it.
Donald Margulies
It’s important that I stay positive in my messages during matches because the rest of the team is following the tone and tension in my voice. Nothing in my voice should let them down.
P. R. Sreejesh
Right now, politics follows the rules of talk radio – using conflict, tension, fear, and resentment to find new recruits.
John Avlon
Our Cuba policy was a major obstacle to getting things done in the hemisphere and a source of tension around the world.
Ben Rhodes
If you have high expectations you’re going to get resentments and all kinds of tension.
Anthony Hopkins
Each of us needs to eliminate our anger, fear and greed. The roots of social conflicts and political tensions are in personal anger, fear and greed.
Satish Kumar
The greatest hope most Americans – including Republicans – had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country’s president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.
Dennis Prager
When I’m speaking on stage I feel my most empowered and my most vulnerable. So much could go wrong. That tension is such a rush.
Danielle LaPorte
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.
William Gibson
No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension – those moments in which character is forged and revealed.
Brad Stone
I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.
Francisco Goldman
Many have questioned the quality of this sort of achievement, deploring the use of pitons, tension traverses and expansion bolts, but the record speaks for itself. This is a technical age and climbers will continue in the future to look for new routes. There is nothing more satisfying than being a pioneer.
Allen Steck
Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness
Oswald Spengler
Thanks to the football, every time I go out and play, it releases the tension, and you forget about the problems.
David Silva
I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension – tension is the only word for it – can be painted.
Patrick Swift
I feel constantly the tension of the quarterly cycles, the drive to produce shareowner value at the cost sometimes of customer value and employee value. [But] if you take equal care of the employees, they will take equal care of the customers and then we will get an equal or better opportunity for our shareowners.
Marilyn C. Nelson
Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence.
Salman Rushdie
I remember going through checkpoints as a kid. It felt normal but, looking back, of course it created tension. People standing with guns, sometimes your car getting searched and being asked where you are going. It changes the atmosphere.
Carl Frampton
There is always tension in women’s gymnastics between athleticism, grace, performance, and eros.
Meghan O’Rourke
Sound design is always critical, especially when you’re doing a thriller with a lot of suspense and tension.
Sam Esmail
‘Crash’ is a movie about the racial tension that still exists in America. A lot of us pretend that we don’t have preconceived notions and stereotypical ideals about each other, but we do. And we wanted to create a movie about people whose lives crash into each others’ accidentally.
Larenz Tate
When I get ready for a high-profile event, it’s really about sleep and making sure I’m eating something healthy, and then it’s always important to stretch to stay limber. No matter what, you want to feel as loose as possible, because it’s easy to get full of excitement or tension with all that’s going on.
Darby Stanchfield
There is so much strife and tension in the world that I find the silent world of paintings from the past both hopeful and healing.
Susan Vreeland
Our communities are being destroyed by racial tension – and we’re too polite to talk about it.
Randall L. Stephenson
I think there is always romantic tension between Lois Lane and Clark Kent.
Gene Luen Yang
You live during the match, and you have strong emotions, but you don’t want to get too overexcited. My body’s totally flat now. I cannot move anymore. I’m totally exhausted, just because of the tension out there.
Roger Federer
It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
Jeff VanderMeer
Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.
William Landay
I didn’t like the nervous tension of being a public person.
Andrew Denton
There’s more tension in golf than in boxing because golfers bring it on themselves. It’s silly really because it’s not as if the golf ball is going to jump up and belt you on the whiskers, is it?
Henry Cooper
There’s an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
Leon Kass
The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government – sometimes – is to keep stuff secret. There’s a natural tension there.
Alex Gibney
I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don’t share problems I’m having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.
Elizabeth Strout
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
John Leonard
Full of thrills and tension – but smart and human too.
Lee Child
My purpose is to allow people to move closer to actually being creatures of free choice, to genuinely reflect individual creativity and emotion, freeing the body of habitual tensions and wired-patterns of behaviour so that it may respond without inhibition to do what the person wants.
Moshe Feldenkrais
What man needs is not just the persistent posing of ultimate questions, but the sense of what is feasible, what is possible, what is correct, here and now. The philosopher, of all people, must, I think, be aware of the tension between what he claims to achieve and the reality in which he finds himself.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
I don’t find the wave model very productive, because I think it kind of serves to fan the flames of generational tension, or make it seem like there’s more generational tension than there actually is.
Jessica Valenti
By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension .
Eugen Herrigel
Creative tension is constructive. Its purpose is to bring out the very best in management so that senior executives can generate the greatest value for shareholders, stakeholders, and society at large.
Punit Renjen
I like films that sort of play out in one confined area. Films that have a feeling that you’re watching a play, a contained environment and a creeping tension.
Derren Brown
Humor is a marvelous communications tool, as Reagan has demonstrated so well. He has weathered many a storm that others might not have. With Reagan, people just say, ‘There he goes again.’ A sense of humor allows a president to back off a little from the tensions of the moment and take a calmer view of things.
Robert Orben
When Gimme Shelter was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune. It’s still wheeled out when big storms happen, as they did the other week. It’s been used a lot to evoke natural disaster.
Mick Jagger
Laughter can help relieve tension in even the heaviest of matters.
Allen Klein
As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: “The tension in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Meditation helps you to learn about character and mind. It relieves you of the tension you have gone through.
Bob Christo
I think the most important part of storytelling is tension. It’s the constant tension of suspense that in a sense mirrors life, because nobody knows what’s going to happen three hours from now.
Richard Condon
…Goldfinger could not have known that high tension was Bond’s natural way of life and that pressure and danger relaxed him.
Ian Fleming
I feel empty, not because of sadness, but because of relief, all the tension flowing out of me.
Veronica Roth
Lord Jesus, bring comfort to all those who mourn and peace of heart to those under pressure and tension, in Jesus Christ’s name
T. B. Joshua
Running is a way for me to relax. With one hour of intense running, I can get a lot of physical exercise. I can relax my body. I feel a tension in my muscles when I don’t run. In that sense, I need to get out a few times a week in order to do my work as a scientist, which involves a lot of sitting still.
Wolfgang Ketterle
There’s always a tension between those who would like to garner wealth, and they contribute a lot to society. There’s also those who say, ‘I believe in the common good. I want that to be enlarged.’ They contribute a lot to society. The tension, the debate, between these two views is extremely important to our progress.
John Sulston
When you have no intention then you have no tension! Be flexible.
Mooji
I remember unbelievable tension in our home. There were lots of meetings, lots of worries. I remember my father told me I had to be careful of what I said on the phone because it was tapped. And I remember how his friends adored and revered him.
Dinah Manoff
It’s got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that’s what’s responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not.
Garry Winogrand
I meditate each day. Going within alleviates tension and stress, and allows me to hear what the Universe wants me to know.
Louise Hay
When you get into the habit of leaving a space, you become a much better player for it. If you’ve got an expressive style, and can express your emotions through your guitar, and you’ve got a great tone, it creates a lot of tension for the audience. It’s all down to the feel thing.
Gary Moore
There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement.
Kazimir Malevich
I will not have my son grow up in a tension-filled home.
Christina Aguilera
The tension between Stephen’s atheistic stance and my faith always existed, but neither of us tried to convert the other. I am not evangelical.
Jane Hawking
I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I’m able to conceal the information I’m trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.
Dan Brown
America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.
Jason Moran
In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.
Ellen Goodman
Often the tension that exists between the pictorial content of a photograph and its record of reality is the picture’s true beauty.
John Loengard
The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For me, a lot of my work has dealt with what it means to be at the center of the universe and how alienating and kind of seductive it is. A lot of my work is very aggressive and very visual, but at the same time, it has a lot of tension in it and makes you kind of uncomfortable sometimes.
Marco Brambilla
Truly embracing the fragility and tensions of life…brings with it the possibility of true joy.
Peter Rollins
I count on chiropractic sessions to keep my body aligned. Standing for hours can impact my posture, and that can throw the rest of my body out of whack. Acupuncture helps me relax and release stress. I’m also very into massage to help release tension in my back, neck, and shoulders.
Giada De Laurentiis
We need two homes, a green one and a brown one, a grown one and a built one, two worlds in tension.
Robert Harbison
When you’re placed in a world where survival is the main focus, a lot of that other stuff, like wrongdoings in the past, become obsolete. You have to focus on the here and now. Yes, there is tension between the two of them.
Alycia Debnam Carey
‘River’ is all about tension and release. It’s about intimacy and solace. It’s about staring someone in the face and not backing down.
Bishop Briggs
The greatest communicators have unknowingly used a story pattern. They not only use anecdotes effectively, but their communication followed a persuasive story pattern of tension and release. That tension and release is created by contrasting [what is] with what could be as a structural device.
Nancy Duarte
But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other’s language.
Richard Rodriguez
The idea of The Boy Vs. The Cynic is the tension between the wide-eyed optimism in youthfulness where you think nothing can go wrong, “I’ve got the world ahead of me. I’m gonna be a go-getter.
John Reuben Zappin
From the beginning, Christianity has struggled to sustain the creative tension between the personal appropriation of the gospel and the gospel’s universal reach.
Stanley Hauerwas
I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.
Jacques Derrida
Are we going to Portland?” I asked. “Or Multnomah Falls?” He smiled at me. “Go to sleep.” I waited three seconds. “Are we there yet?” His smile widened, and the last of the usual tension melted from his face. For a smile like that, I’d…do anything.
Patricia Briggs
Honestly, I’d love to be remembered as one of the best to ever pick up a mic, but if I’m doing my part to lessen some racial tension I feel good about what I’m doing.
Eminem
The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
Roger Martin
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?
Doris Lessing
The criminal-justice system is, obviously, the sole source of racial tension in this country [USA] or the key institution to resolving the opportunity gap. It is a part of the broader set of challenges that we face in creating a more perfect union.
Barack Obama
Over the years, I’ve been offered quite a few reality shows, and a lot of times they’re about bickering and drama. I watch some of the Housewives, and that can create some real tension in your family!
Tish Cyrus
I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure – the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play – and inelegant emotion.
Patrick Marber
Please don’t tell me to relax, it’s only my tension that’s holding me together.
Ashleigh Brilliant
When we feel joyful, euphoric, happy, we are more open to life, more capable of seeing things clearly and handling daily tensions.
Leo Buscaglia
The gigantic tension before the shooting of an arrow, and the total relaxation seconds later, is my way of connecting to the universe.
Paulo Coelho
Maybe the most interesting thing gay writers can do is show the tension between the breadth of gay experiences and the unity of what they have in common.
Vestal McIntyre
Alfred Hitchcock had to find ways to create tension without showing it, but now with computer-generated effects you can show anything.
Giles Duley
Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them.
Aaron Siskind
Economists love to talk about incentives, but the bottom line is that people hate being controlled or manipulated, even when done through voluntary institutions. This is one of the most important tensions in capitalism.
Tyler Cowen
It won’t be the same for me,” I whispered, half to myself. “You won’t let me be like that. We’ll live in Antarctica.” Edward snorted, breaking the tension. “Penguins. Lovely.
Stephenie Meyer
“Alleluia” song is a street hymn in the sense that it’s all about culture.It’s almost a juxtaposition of the prayers of the world and the prayers of the culture and how we sometimes put an “amen” after crazy things. So it’s really just that tension between madness and simplicity.
Jonathan Jackson
the end of anything is a relief. In every relationship, even the most valuable, there are certain unpleasant tensions – and the ending of it snaps those taut inner wires.
Kathleen Winsor
When I am designing, my aim is to create tension and then gradually proceed into quiet.
Jacques Wirtz
I think good things come out of having tension with the people that you work with. You’ve got to be arguing in order to produce something interesting. If everyone’s just agreeing with each other, you’re not going to push the boundaries.
Felicity Jones
I really like melodies that have a certain tension against the chords. I like writing things that are sort of insistent.
Corinne Bailey Rae
In some units it may suppress the motor discharge altogether, in some it may merely slow the motor discharge thus lessening the wave frequency of the contraction and so the tension.
Charles Scott Sherrington
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
Marilyn Hacker
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.
Simon Pegg
Side Effects Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on the weekend. Woody Allen Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen
There are interesting tensions that will naturally occur with any relationship. No matter what setting, what era, the tension is very, very real. It’s basic human tension.
Lyriq Bent
The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black – a first in human history – has had no impact on what are called ‘racial tensions.’
Dennis Prager
On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters – words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.
Alan Alda
The majority of people imagine a chess master as being a townsman who passes his life in an atmosphere of smoke and play in cafes and clubs: a neurasthenic individual, whose nerves and brains are continually working at tension: a one-sided person who has given up his whole soul to chess.
Richard Reti
There is a strong tendency in explanatory prose to invoke quantities of tension, energy, and whatnot to explain the genesis of pattern. I believe that all such explanations are inappropriate or wrong.
Gregory Bateson
I’m ashamed to say it, but I watch YouTube videos of our live shows, wondering if it actually sounded the way it sounded when I was playing it, and the consistent thing I see is that you can feel the anxiety and the tension and it’s over-aggressive a lot of the time.
Justin Chancellor
Music is like a huge release of tension.
James Taylor
While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police, only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.
Barack Obama
Mental tensions, frustrations, insecurity, aimlessness are among the most damaging stressors, and psychosomatic studies have shown how often they cause migraine headache, peptic ulcers, heart attacks, hypertension, mental disease, suicide, or just hopeless unhappiness.
Hans Selye
Creativity reduces instinctual tension, it fuses pleasure with reality, and satisfies the libido.
Peter Shepherd
The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.
Carl Jung
There’s always a tension in my world between the pragmatic and the practical and the theoretical. I have a very theoretical turn of mind, but I also like to test things in place.
Michael Pollan
I’ve consciously taken on material that’s a bit too much for me but not an overreach. The first movie, just about performances. ‘The Town,’ I learned how to work broader material, develop tension, direct bigger scenes, action sequences. ‘Argo,’ I experimented with film stock, widened the scope of my geography.
Ben Affleck
Yoga reduced my stress and bodily tension. It allowed me to bring my body back into balance, to emerge from my fertility struggle with my sense of self esteem and self worth intact, and to forge a stronger bond with my husband.
Brenda Strong
Everyone who has run knows that its most important value is in removing tension and allowing a release from whatever other cares the day may bring.
Jimmy Carter
Imagine wave after wave of joy passing through your whole body. As each wave passes through your body, feel that all worries, tensions, anxieties and problems are being washed away.
Frederick Lenz
The family gives you ambition, and ambition is one of the hindrances for enlightenment. It gives you desires, it gives you a longing to be successful, and all these things create your tensions, your anxieties: how to be a celebrity?
Rajneesh
It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.
Thich Nhat Hanh
A lot of shows peak after a series and never get it back, but ‘Breaking Bad’ keeps the tension up all the time.
Miranda Raison
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
Will Self
What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.
Paul Valery
Doing nothing means unplugging from the compulsion to always keep ourselves busy, the habit of shielding ourselves from certain feelings, the tension of trying to manipulate our experience before we even fully acknowledge what that experience is.
Sharon Salzberg
Relaxation means releasing all concern and tension and letting the natural order of life flow through one’s being.
Donald Curtis
If the room is friendly to a relationship between lecturer and audience, you feel everything – the tension, the appreciation. I think the audience feels it too.
Frank Gehry
There’s always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.
Bryan Burrough
The greater the tension, the greater is the potential.
Carl Jung
I see in the rising crescendo of ethnic tensions, civilization clashes and the use of religious justification for acts of terror, a clear and present danger to humanity.
Jonathan Sacks
There is tension all over the country. The party in Bengal has done substantial work. They have eliminated a few officers. The Englishmen are terrified. As a result, they have started sending their families to Britain. After some time, they will realise that they cannot exercise authority over India.
Bhagat Singh
A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain….The solution is not splicing the rope; it’s lessening the tension.
Jack Vance
Nondiscrimination is a great American principle. It’s a core American principle, as is religious freedom. When you have two important American principles coming into tension, into conflict with one another, our goal as Americans is to sit down and try to see if we can uphold both.
Charles Haynes
Perhaps inevitably, media stories focus on differences, which exacerbates tensions; yet Islamic radicalization is, in part, an acute expression of broader trends that affect us all.
Munira Mirza
I love Topsail Island, which my grandparents helped settle in 1950, despite the racial tensions. I wanted to immortalize my deep connection to this special island forever.
Rolonda Watts
The Arab Spring has heightened the ideological tension between Ankara and Tehran, and Turkey’s model seems to be winning.
Mustafa Akyol
The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.
Terence McKenna
Tension of opposites.
Mitch Albom
I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.
JR
I’m sure I’ll also be very attentive to how tension is built and maintained in a story. I think this curiosity is the heart of all my texts, and it’s something vital that I also seek in everything I read.
Samanta Schweblin
A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.
J. D. McClatchy
My mom told us never to reveal that we were Shia in school. You would find out that some other kid was Shiite, and you would whisper, ‘Hey,’ or you would see someone at the mosque, and you’d be like, ‘Hey, that kid’s Shiite!’ There was a lot of tension, a lot of violence in Karachi between Shiites and Sunnis.
Kumail Nanjiani
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
Woody Allen
Monopoly may also end in tears, but its tensions are cruder, lacking the infinitely subtle shadings of irritation and acrimony provided by Scrabble.
Craig Brown
The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.
Mrinalini Sarabhai
I believe that one of the great problems for us as individuals is the depression and the tension resulting from existence in a world which is increasingly less pleasing to the eye.
Lady Bird Johnson
One way to break up any kind of tension is good deep breathing.
Byron Nelson
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.
Graham Greene
I work via the high-tension-wire method, which is maybe going for long periods without writing while the tension builds up – when am I going to write this, am I going to be able to write this, what is this image about – and I’m thinking about it all the time, but I’m not really inside it, inside the writing.
Jayne Anne Phillips
It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.
Edward Abbey
What made al Qaeda retrieve the doctrine of militant jihad, and Breivik the ideas of crusade and reconquest, is a sense of siege. So, we should help both Westerners and Muslims get rid of that sense by easing their political tensions and by fostering dialogue between them.
Mustafa Akyol
With my students, I don’t offer any simple tips like that, maybe because my own process is pretty messy, but when we workshop we talk a lot about the deeper subject, which is what the story or novel is about. I think defining a narrative’s themes can lay bare a narrative’s tensions.
Edan Lepucki
Going home means getting comfortable being who you are and who your soul really wants to be. There is no strain with that. The strain and tension come when we’re not being who our soul wants to be and we’re someplace where our soul doesn’t feel at home.
Melody Beattie
The challenge for me is to make sure I’ve done my work. To make sure not every scene is quiet, that other scenes rise up, that there’s different tension.
Debra Granik
Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.
Pankaj Mishra
My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.
Hayden Carruth
You have to create tension between reality and aspiration
Sumantra Ghoshal
Constant tension should be applied to the last five reps of every working set, meaning, do the first 5-6 reps normal tempo, and the last few reps should be held for at least two seconds at the peak of the contraction. This allows your muscles to have more time under tension, and you work different muscle fibers.
Phil Heath
As a person, I do not like tension in squabbles; I also do not like being on tenterhooks. When I am in love, it’s the same. Especially with regards to love, I want very much to protect it.
Joo Won
Some of my friends said I wouldn’t have a future in football, as did some of my family, but I still believed in the potential I had. My mum would tell me I needed to get a proper job, but for me, I didn’t want to be anything other than a footballer. That led to some tension and frustration between us.
Richarlison
When I’m looking for Zen and I’m not saying this facetiously at all – I would really rather surf, scuba dive, or fly my plane. And, when I feel tension about the grind of work, it’s not getting the money to make films versus making films that constitutes the grind, it’s all this stuff.
Edward Norton
Failures do what is tension relieving, while winners do what is goal achieving.
Denis Waitley
Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the ‘last man’ he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.
John Carroll
The urge to gain release from tension by action is a precipitating cause of war.
B. H. Liddell Hart
I’m drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise’s [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century – wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars.
Laura Moriarty
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Mahatma Gandhi
Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye.
Jessica Helfand
This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.
Tariq Ali
The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one’s contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.
Angela Davis
It seems a universal rule in this world that people will always look for victims and scapegoats, does it not? Especially at times of difficulty and tension.
C.J. Sansom
The one thing that I love about the live audience is the energy level. Like, from the minute of cast introductions, it’s just constant energy being traded back and forth. When you do something funny, the audience laughs; when you’re being serious, you can, like, feel the tension going through the audience.
Jonathan Sadowski
A constant tension exists between an individual’s interests, personal needs, and skills, and what the organization requires of her. We’ve all asked ourselves, How much of my own agenda should I sacrifice in order to help the rest of the staff meet the company’s goals?
Pat Heim
In the province of Quebec where I come from, we speak French, and the only cosmopolitan city is Montreal. Every time we tackle the subject of immigration and racial tension, it’s an issue that concerns Montreal.
Philippe Falardeau
Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that engender them.
Karl Jaspers
We listened to Donald Trump speak at the debate about ‘Stop and Frisk.’ I don’t think it’s a good way to go through life. I don’t think that’s going to solve any of our problems. It’s actually going to make racial tension a whole lot worse, and it’s going to make us feel like we’re singled out.
Booker T
there’s too much tension in the world… what hope is there in the middle east if you and i can’t make peace.
Megan McCafferty
Some tension is necessary for the soul to grow, and we can put that tension to good use. We can look for every opportunity to give and receive love, to appreciate nature, to heal our wounds and the wounds of others, to forgive, and to serve.
Joan Z. Borysenko
‘I Spy’ represents the absence of the tension of the black man or black woman or anyone of that color walking in, so that the white racist person can become entertaining to a viewer.
Bill Cosby
Having to stake out your identity and have people question whether or not you’re being yourself was a tension that I could relate to.
Dee Rees
People confuse friendship and relaxation. It’s incredibly important to be relaxed – you don’t have a chance if you’re not relaxed. So I try very hard to relax any kind of tension. But friendship is different.
Bill Murray
He can be regarded as the great master of simplification. The art of resolving the tension at the critical moment and in the most effacious way so as to clarify the position as desired is Capablanca’s own.
Max Euwe
When I had just started ‘Cheers,’ my nerves were ajangle, to put it mildly. I was absolutely terrified. What you’re learning is to not show the fear, and to ultimately overcome it so that the level of relaxation is commensurate with the level of tension.
Woody Harrelson
Temperament and tightness often go together. But if you’re tight, you can’t sing. So I have to have that tension in my body but not in my voice.
Sondra Radvanovsky
I believe our emotional tension can manifest itself physically.
Tom Shadyac
Washington’s adventuristic policy, whipping up international tension to the utmost, is pushing mankind towards nuclear catastrophe.
Konstantin Chernenko
As an actor, I always like some tension, some distance, between me and the character I’m playing.
Holly Hunter
The root cause of the looming energy problem – and the key to easing environmental, economic and religious tensions while improving public health – is to address the unending, and unequal, growth of the human population. And the one proven way to reduce fertility rates is to empower young women by educating them.
Lawrence M. Krauss
I actually want to hold on to where I came from, and also I want to be at this bar in Brooklyn, even if I’m not drinking at all. What does that tension look like? It’s less an attack on the parents and more an interrogation of personal guilt, personal responsibility. That’s my internal dialogue.
Ramy Youssef
The gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there were no gap, there would be no need for any action to move towards the vision. We call this gap creative tension.
Peter Senge
There is a leisure about walking, no matter what pace you set, that lets down the tension.
Hal Borland
Inequality and hierarchy are natural, but that doesn’t mean they are right, that doesn’t mean there is isn’t a productive tension between those forces and the forces of equality.
Chris Hayes
Anything that’s resolvable is boring, musically. And if it’s too chaotic, you don’t feel tension; it’s chaos.
James Murphy
From the start of his administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with Russia and refocus American attention on a rising China; he had made clear he wanted no part in the problems of the post-Soviet periphery.
Keith Gessen
A picture should be a re-creation of an event rather than an illustration of an object; but there is no tension in the picture unless there is a struggle with the object.
Francis Bacon
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.
Anatole Broyard
Whenever there is injustice, there is tension. But in China it is very hard to release your anger unless you burn yourself or you jump from a bridge. In a society where there is no freedom of the press, it is difficult for victims to be noticed.
Ai Weiwei
Coffee has … expand[ed] humanity’s working-day from twelve to a potential twenty-four hours. The tempo, the complexity, the tension of modern life, call for something that can perform the miracle of stimulating brain activity, without evil, habit-forming after-effects.
Margaret Meagher
I think people are at their most creative when they’re relaxed. I don’t believe that tension is good for creativity. Everyone is relaxed and therefore can feel able to express their own individual creativity and lots of ideas come in. It’s a joy like that.
Joe Wright
The United States, whenever it comes to any region in the world where there are tensions, asks for people to observe the rule of law, respect for human rights, respect for international norms. We ask people to maintain peace and security and direct dialogue.
Morgan Ortagus
Right now, there’s the illusion of order and civilization, but there’s a tremendous amount of economic tension in this country and the educational system is constantly eroding.
Kathryn Bigelow
Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.
Lester B. Pearson
I’ve always been somebody who was just bouncing off the walls and high tension, hyperactive, you know what I’m saying?
Rich Swann
A lot of weekend players struggle with putting because they have too much tension in their hands and arms, both at address and during the stroke. Tension can turn a technically perfect motion into a herky-jerky mess, especially on those knee-knockers.
Jordan Spieth
I’d sort of gone through some sort of spiritual change in the late 70s where I sort of saw there was some other life to live. It changed the way that I worked just having a different presence and a different tension.
Bill Murray
Politicians are constantly stuck between what is politically expedient and politically beneficial and what is the responsible or right thing to do. It’s a tension we all go through.
Justin Trudeau
If you turn the heat down on the relationship, she will soften, the tension will lessen, and she will eventually inch closer to you. Don’t go in for the hug until you achieve a handshake.
Amy Dickinson
Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.
Peter Tork
We haven’t had a recession for 25 years in Australia. It’s partly because of our trade with China. China’s been doing relatively well. So some of the tensions around a low-wage economy haven’t quite happened here in the same way as they have in the United States.
Richard Glover
Tension is anticipation and uncertainty. Every art has to have it.
Rex Brandt
I think it’s hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
Edwidge Danticat
Just a reminder – a guidebook is no substitute for skill, experience, judgment and lots of tension.
Charlie Fowler
Between major countries, there certainly always are some common ground and points of tension.
Vladimir Putin
One lives one’s life under constant tension, until it’s time to go for good
Albert Einstein
I grew up in Los Angeles when the racial tensions between blacks and Mexicans were very high. Gang violence was very prevalent.
Miguel
We moved to a town that’s predominately Caucasian, some Hispanic and one or two black families, and they do shrimping for a living. Here come hundreds of Vietnamese doing the same occupation. So there was a lot of tension because people were saying we were taking money, shrimp, fish or whatever it is.
Dat Nguyen
This tension between ambition and parenthood, that’s not a reckoning that many men face. There are plenty of men who say, ‘Oh, I need to be there for my kids, and I can’t do x or y professionally,’ but for the most part, that’s a struggle that belongs to women in society.
Rumaan Alam
The United States must not allow North Korea to exacerbate tensions between our key strategic allies in Asia. As the leader of the free world, the United States needs to support our regional allies who are standing up to a Stalinist regime that is intent on developing nuclear weapons.
Evan Bayh
I think there’s always great tension because there never seems to be enough – there is always pressure. There’s always pressure because there isn’t enough time. There’s never enough time for a movie, it seems to me. Never.
Maggie Smith
If you’re writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you’d better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along.
Nancy Kress
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
Mitch Albom
Eight, sir; seven, sir; Six, sir; five, sir; Four, sir; Three, sir; Two, sir; one! Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, And dissension have begun.
Alfred Bester
Once I get onstage the tension explodes and I’m fine. I’m in another world – in a trance almost, doing what I love best, expressing myself through guitar.
Jimmy Page
The tension I feel is the moment they say, ‘Action!’ Movies are like lightning in a bottle, and you always want to find when you possibly can catch a surprising moment.
Annette Bening
By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions.
James Lovelock
It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.
Nhat Hanh
My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.
Paulo Coelho
In a democracy there will always be a tension between security and privacy.
Keir Starmer
Good design successfully manages the tensions between user needs, technology feasibility, and business viability.
Tim Brown
One of the tensions in XR are people who want to slow down and be strategic and then people who think it’s an emergency, let’s get out on the street now. There have been conflicts and disagreements.
Gail Bradbrook
Im interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.
Roy Lichtenstein
We legitimately walked into ‘Anthem’ head-on, not paying enough attention to internal band tension.
Isaac Hanson
Between religion’s this is and poetry’s but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
Northrop Frye
I’m looking for an intensity of focus. It’s a bit like tuning a guitar string. You tighten and tighten, and nothing really changes until you hit that tension, and suddenly it’s there: you’ve got a note.
Lenny Abrahamson
A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.
Aesop
The European girls, like the Russians, tend to stick together, but there’s never any rivalry. Sometimes there’s a little bit of tension with the older girls because they might feel a little threatened by the younger models, but it’s not between personalities.
Abbey Lee Kershaw
The more relaxed the muscles are, the more energy can flow through the body. Using muscular tensions to try to ‘do’ the punch or attempting to use brute force to knock someone over will only work to opposite effect.
Bruce Lee
Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?
James Hilton
Levity is the lubricant of a crisis. We resort to jokes, pranks and good natured kidding to relieve tension, stress and boredom.
Wally Schirra
Coming from bad results, you have more tension and you get more into the game, maybe. You never know which is best. I prefer to come from good results. You have more confidence and you believe you are doing things well. But in football everything can change very quickly.
Tito Vilanova
I have always been drawn to characters, and this was true for my feature-writing career as well, where there is a tension between rule-breaking and rule-following.
Matt Nix
To follow Jesus doesn’t remove us from the stuff of life. It is not resolution. It is tension and journey.
Crowder
If you are inflexible in the body, look at what you are holding onto unnecessarily in your life. Release tension, and life will open up.
Tara Stiles
In all my novels, a sense of place – not just geographic but social – is a critical element. I have always been drawn to the novels of Edith Wharton, among others, where social dynamics are crucial. Wharton’s class consciousness fascinates me, and some of the tension in my books stems from that.
Susan Wiggs
Oil prices jumped to well over $100 a barrel, and analysts say it’s due to tension in the Middle East. So, luckily, it’s just a temporary thing.
Jay Leno
No expectations, no tension between goals and performance, no outrage, resolve or intention, no action, no results. There’s only one way to get a government – and a nation – to stop drifting to low performance. That’s to wake up and insist on higher standards.
Donella Meadows
We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honour the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity, or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.
Earl Warren
Its fun for me to go on other folks talk shows. When youve endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.
Dick Cavett
The tension between us kicked up a notch, and I realized that along with our bodies being nearer, so were our lips.
Richelle Mead
Dating is pressure and tension. What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night?
Jerry Seinfeld
If you don’t generate tension in the film to begin with… you can’t really make a purse out of a sow’s ear, you know.
Dennis Weaver
Both the BJP and the SP are trying to create communal tension but people have become aware.
Mayawati
Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there’s this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling.
Miranda July
Botox not only helps with wrinkles, it actually makes you feel more relaxed as frowning causes tension.
Patricia Cornwell
It’s fun for me to go on other folks’ talk shows. When you’ve endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.
Dick Cavett
A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding.
Patrick O’Brian
Unless you seek out help for your symptoms, you’ll never really know that that’s not how everyone feels. You go through life thinking that this is how you feel in certain situations and that I can ease the tensions by doing this or that.
Matty Mullins
I think a lot of contemplation happens in bathtubs. It does for me. Nothing like a hot bath to ease the tension and think about what’s going to happen next.
Sarah McLachlan
I love that tension between machine sounds and organic sounds, and also the contrast between abrasive sounds and soft sounds.
Jon Hopkins
There must be some tensions in a team, which you can’t always wipe away or smooth over.
Michael Ballack
The tension between standing apart, and being fully involved; that is what makes a writer.
Nadine Gordimer
Something I keep coming back to in my music is the tension between two extremes: healing and chaos, hope and anxiety – these big themes are inside us, flickering, all day.
Arca
Love, whether it’s friendship or more, is like a cup. It fills up drop by drop, until one last drop and the cup is full. The liquid hangs there almost above the rim, hangs there on surface tension alone and you know that one more drop and it will spill over.
Laurell K. Hamilton
I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.
Ingmar Bergman
I am not afraid to appear in Israel, although when I come to a place like Israel, I know it’s not a picnic by the Thames. I am aware of the tension and it saddens me.
Ian Anderson
I try to make that tension almost stupidly overt in my projects, almost ridiculously so. I keep coming back to the same obvious points again and again.
Aleksandra Mir
Most people engage in activities that are tension-relieving rather than goal-achieving.
Brian Tracy
If I stage things too much and nothing changes in the act of photographing, then I might as well have not taken the picture: If the whole thing already exists in my head, then I haven’t learned anything. The tension lies between the staging and the unpredictability.
Justine Kurland
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
I’m a physical actor in that I start with a physical sketch of the character. I find it easier to find inspiration from the outside in. If I find the character’s tensions and the way he carries himself or looks, that’s going to affect how I talk. So that’s how I start to create that person.
Joel Kinnaman
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
McQueen is an astonishing film maker. He uses really unusual shots and builds incredible dramatic tension.
Kevin Whately
Plays are wonderfully different than short stories, first because it’s a story that’s on a stage, but there’s a different sort of tension that appears on stage – you get to see your characters in a different way – like with lights.
Amy Bloom
I don’t show tension and nervousness, but I know how fast my heartbeat races before a race.
Hima Das
The media role in highlighting racial incidents only serves to exacerbate tension. We rarely write about racial harmony.
Bob Beckel
Secrecy involves a tension which, at the moment of revelation, finds its release.
Georg Simmel
Basically, in the fight-or-flight response, the objective is to get away from the source of threat. All of our muscles prepare for this escape by increasing their tension level, our heart rate and respiration increase, and our whole basic metabolic system is flooded with adrenaline.
Peter A. Levine
A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.
Russell Kirk
Tension is wonderful for making people laugh.
John Cleese
There’s such a deep, conservative feeling in ‘The way Back.’ You go, ‘gosh, we’ve gotten narrow.’ So at the moment I think there’s a kind of tension, and it’s gold rush fever.
Peter Weir
To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.
Emile M. Cioran
There’s always a tension between wanting to write a really concise, instant gratification type song that gets under your skin the first time you hear it, and wanting to really stretch out. I think it’s a healthy tension.
Andrew Bird
I’ve never seen a professor of religion on television before, and I thought that was fascinating. The creative tension with spirituality vs. practicality in the world of politics is a vital conversation.
Tim Daly
It’s experiences in life that give us something to write about, and since good fiction is applied tension, you’ll have an arsenal of good material if life hasn’t been peachy (and not a whole lot if it has).
Wendelin Van Draanen
The problem is too often they are boring, and boring in a meeting happens for the same reason as in a book or movie – when there is not enough compelling tension. Meetings should be intense.
Patrick Lencioni
Music and comedy are so linked. The rhythm of comedy is con­nected to the rhythm of music. They’re both about creating tension and knowing when to let it go. I’m always surprised when somebody funny is not musical.
Conan O’Brien
In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony.
Theodore E. Steinway
All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up.
Ingmar Bergman
The tension between public and private science is powerful.
Wil S. Hylton
Too much tension can do bad things to you.
Paolo Maldini
I want tension in my business. Tension creates change. Change is necessary to evolve and prosper. I am never satisfied.
Kenneth C. Griffin
I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.
Sue Monk Kidd
Tension can be useful, exciting, flirtatious, strength-building, or destructive. Put yourself in charge of how you direct it.
Tara Stiles
My goal is not to resolve conflicts and tensions in the region through more war. My goal is to make sure that, you know, we are able to negotiate a deal that we can verify.
Barack Obama
I think people like to be scared. I think people like tension and suspense in a movie.
Damian Lewis
There’s a constant tension between the excitement of new people and security with one person. If you go with excitement, you create chaos; you hurt people. There’s jealousy, and it gets very messy. If you have security, it can be boring, and you die inside because of all the opportunities missed.
Alain de Botton
From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.
David Lindsay-Abaire
Comedy has to do with holding and releasing tension; it’s very technical. It’s more technical than drama.
John Michael Higgins
Fiction shows the external effects of internal conditions. Be aware of the tension between internal and external movement.
Raymond Carver
There is always tension between the possibilities we aspire to and our wounded memories and past mistakes.
Sean Brady
I would say I am at peace with the mystery of my mother’s journals. Of course, I will always wonder, but isn’t that the creative tension of living with uncertainty? By leaving me her empty journals, my mother has made herself very present.
Terry Tempest Williams
There is a huge tension in trying to write with small children because they demand your attention and your time with a fierceness that can be matched by nothing else, but if you are successful in writing while you have small children, I actually think that your writing is likely to be deeper than it was before.
Alexi Zentner
Like students going to school, the planes on their bombing missions fly over Beijing each morning. And each time I hear their engines attack the air I feel a certain slight tension, as if I were witnessing the invasion of Death, though this heightens my consciousness of the existence of Life.
Lu Xun
Many people try to avoid pressure, yet the absence of any tension or pressure usually creates a sense of boredom and the lackluster experience of life that so many people complain about.
Tony Robbins
When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.
Stacey Abrams
I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience
Bridget Riley
In order to reprogram the subconscious mind, you need to relax the body. Release the tension. Let the emotions go. Get to a state of openness and receptivity. You are always in change. You are always safe.
Louise Hay
I think tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary. Perhaps it is something we seek out in order to affirm that our small lives are tethered to something large and ongoing.
Tracy K. Smith
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.
Sheila Cassidy
Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.
Criss Jami
For me, a good comedy town is filled with people on the verge of a riot. They need something to relieve the tension.
Jim Norton
I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.
St. Lucia
Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.
Alfred Bester
Color is a plastic means of creating intervals… color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.
Hans Hofmann
Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension.
Donovan
There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it’s not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself.
Lee Smolin
When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.
Andrea Mitchell
It took so much of the tension out of me that my friends and family won’t see me on this show.
Jonathan Frid
It’s like learning to fall properly. If you can manage not to tighten up you won’t hurt yourself as much. The same theory applies to your day, physically and emotionally. The tensions simply can’t take hold.
Diane von Furstenberg
For fast-acting relief try slowing down.
Lily Tomlin
The radical tension between good and evil, as man sees it and feels it, does not have the last word about the meaning of life and the nature of existence. There is a spirit in man and in
the world working always against the thing that destroys and lays waste.
Howard Thurman
With scale, there always becomes this tension of, how do you keep the start-up philosophy?
Patrick Pichette
Ever since Modi became prime minister, he has given a free rein to his ministers and BJP functionaries to create an environment of communal tension and violence.
Kapil Sibal
I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn’t learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.
Flea
My environment can give me relief from sin and tension, only the Lord can cure it.
Henry R Brandt
Narrative is so important for building the sexual tension. Can you imagine a horror movie that only shows the blood, with no context? I think women need to get to know the characters before they start stripping.
Erika Lust
There’s a tension in Washington that was undeniable. I could write my name in the air there.
Barry Trotz
The ‘$O$’ phase, it was like, ‘Save Our Souls’: we didn’t know how we were going to get out of our situation… It was our last chance just to go all out. ‘Ten$ion’ was another phase, to maintain the tension we had, just to pretend nothing had happened and stay in that same furious, hungry zone.
Watkin Tudor Jones
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.
Koren Zailckas
Hold still,” my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he’d raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.
Alice Sebold
The creative tension with spirituality vs. practicality in the world of politics is a vital conversation.
Tim Daly
It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
At a time when there is so much tension in the world – between cultures, and nations, and so forth – there is nothing that levels the playing field more than the arts.
Emma Walton Hamilton
As a director, when you cut scenes from a movie, you do it with the idea that it is making the story move forward and progress. Sometimes, you don’t realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.
Catherine Hardwicke
I am miserable when everything is in order and quiet. Seriously, it’s hard for me when I can go home quietly, go to sleep, and get up in the morning without fear and tension.
Yitzhak Shamir
The way in which science and religion by and large complement each other is becoming ever clearer, as are the natures of the various points of tension between them and some possible resolutions of those tensions.
George F. R. Ellis
The difference with Cleveland is that the racial tension was not a casual taste of it. It was outlandish.
Terrence Howard
It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.
Eric Hoffer
Excessive economic, social and cultural inequalities among peoples arouse tensions and conflicts, and are a danger to peace.
Pope Paul VI
As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.
Naguib Mahfouz
I am very intense. I can’t help it. That’s the way I am. You can’t be in this business without being intense. The pressure and tension get to you; it can’t help but show on you.
Irene Cara
Life is filled with problems to be solved and tensions to be managed. Sometimes it helps to know which is which.
Andy Stanley
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.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
When you have two very passionate, very strong personalities in one house and nobody can back down and nobody is that calming force for one another, it’s a lot of emotion and it’s a lot of tension in one house.
Andi Dorfman
With so much racial tension and issues between the police and black and minority ethnic groups, there needs to be more in-depth conversations if we’re going to fix anything.
Clare-Hope Ashitey
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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension – which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.
Monica Hesse
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.
Marie-Louise von Franz
Perhaps all human progress stems from the tension between two basic drives: to have just what everyone else has and to have what no one has.
Judith Stone
I have always consistently opposed high-tension and alternating systems of electric lighting…not only on account of danger, but because of their general unreliability and unsuitability for any general system of distribution.
Thomas A. Edison
Tensions exist in any free society. But the freedom we enjoy rests on a foundation of individual liberty and shared moral values.
Tipper Gore
‘Fargo’ is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable, and that’s what makes it tragic. It’s about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same.
Noah Hawley
Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for their own political gain.
Dinaw Mengestu
The more I think about sex, the better it gets. Here we have a purpose in life, good for the blood circulation, good for releasing the tension.
Kate Bush
Life is not a struggle, not a tension. Life has not to be suffering. Life is bliss
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
Once people start to think they’ve wasted parts of their life, or they’re wasting their life as they speak, that means there’s going to be great dramatic and comedic tension.
Denis Leary
I tend to believe, when you’re in a relationship, if you don’t fight, it’s not a real relationship. You have to have arguments and tensions, otherwise I don’t believe it.
Richard LaGravenese
Everyone claims to be okay with freedom of religion, but the moment you mention God there is a strange tension that fills the air. If there was a 6th sense, that would be it.
Criss Jami
On my sets, everybody seems very relaxed. I always try to avoid any tension before it even begins. A shooting has to be like a party. The creative process must be joyful, even if the final result is meant to be sad or scary.
Gaspar Noe
If I had to choose one which best characterized the condition of being a political leader in Athens, the word would be “tension”.
Moses Finley
Not knowing what’s happening, from script to script, as an actor and as a character, lends itself to the same tension and anxiety of not knowing what’s happening.
Matthew Davis
We like to keep the sexual tension underplayed, especially between the Smoking Man and me. Once we thought he was my father . . . it got more interesting.
David Duchovny
As our relationship with China grows and matures, tensions will naturally emerge.
Henry Paulson
Smile, smile , smile
At your mind
As often as possible.
Your smiling will considerably reduce
Your mind’s tearing tension.
Sri Chinmoy
Unbridled capitalism in the United States can’t be sustained socially. It leads to tensions.
Kenneth Rogoff
You must not only learn to live with tension, you must seek it out. You must learn to thrive on stress.
J. Paul Getty
When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.
David Olusoga
Japan is opposed to any actions that escalate tensions in the South China Sea.
Yoshihide Suga
I could have kissed you months ago, but it wouldn’t have meant anything. I wished for you to see me. And want me. So…did you mean it?” “Yes,” I said, and some unnamed tension inside me eased. “I see you, Tod.
Rachel Vincent
I am, in fact, the complete anti-Messiah, and detest converts almost as much as I detest missionaries. My writings, such as they are, have had only one purpose: to attain for H. L. Mencken that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
H. L. Mencken
We all read news stories about the difficulties and tensions that the United States has with our allies and even with coalition partners in Iraq, but we rarely read about the good news.
Michael K. Simpson
Life is like the harp string, if it is strung too tight it won’t play, if it is too loose it hangs, the tension that produces the beautiful sound lies in the middle.
Gautama Buddha
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.
Henry Reed
Maybe by nature and because of my past I protect myself. The minute I feel any tension I take myself away.
Georgia Toffolo
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
Rollo May
There’s always a tension in me between my urge to destroy and my will to live… Every morning I wake up with a new wrath, a new suspiciousness, a new desire to live.
Ingmar Bergman
The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today’s life.
Matthew Weiner
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.
Edward Snowden
An empty canvas, apparently really empty, that says nothing and is without significance – almost dull, in fact – in reality, is crammed with thousands of undertone tensions and full of expectancy. Slightly apprehensive lest it should be outraged.
Wassily Kandinsky
Moreover, such a body freed from nervous tension and over-fatigue is the ideal shelter provided by nature for housing a well-balanced mind that is always fully capable of successfully meeting all of the complex problems of modern living.
Joseph Pilates
I think that we live in a remarkably networked world. The problem with that, of course, is that tensions can travel in nanoseconds across the Internet, and so the tensions between Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad, or between Protestants and Catholics in Belfast – those show up in different parts of the world.
Eboo Patel
I accept the global complex and global trade more than do some of my liberal colleagues because I consider this a wise alternative to national tension and conflict.
John Kenneth Galbraith
I associate a family as the safest place in the world. So when it comes to things that scare me, introducing instability and tension into where you’re supposed to be the safest really strikes a chord with me.
Mike Flanagan
An inherent tension between the seeming ineffectiveness of immediate and individual action and the long view the government is trying to take here may be common to every society trying to reduce emissions and to encourage participation.
Tatiana Schlossberg
It seems when I put together records, as Henley used to say, they’re just like movies. They should have action, tension, love scenes, places to relax.
Glenn Frey
The pro playoff system doesn’t cause the same tension. Suppose a team has a bad night? It can bounce back in the next game. In college tournament all they can hope for is the consolation, maybe.
George Mikan
Wherever there are communities fighting for freedom and liberation, there are serious tensions.
Patrisse Cullors
So much tension around here in New York. They want to fine you for every little thing you do.
Latrell Sprewell
‘Game of Thrones’ isn’t all about magic – it’s way more about political scheming and family tensions – but to be a part of this exclusive magic club is actually really cool.
Isaac Hempstead Wright
I have always loved telling stories about families. I love the idea of people who may not choose to be together, but are nonetheless bonded for life and forced to interact and develop these relationships. I love the tension throwing different types of people under one roof creates.
Jeff Lemire
The only effect that I ever noticed from smoking marijuana was a sort of mild sedative, a release of tension when I was overworking. It never made me boisterous of quarrelsome. If anything, it calmed me and reduced my activity.
Robert Mitchum
I believe some of the tensions the U.S. has had with Russia and that the Europeans have had with Russia… China is taking advantage of some of those dealings.
Henry Paulson
Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man.
Criss Jami
There’s always very high tension with dance auditions! You’re in a group, watching the people in the front of the room, hoping you’ll get something, anything that will relieve a bit of the stress.
Sarah Hay
A soccer game is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure bliss, trumpet-tongued Gabriel sings, and gods descend from Olympus to dance – this peak of ecstasy.
Rabih Alameddine
The ability to create and to control the tension of battle is perhaps the principal attainment of the great player.
Savielly Tartakower
Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions – the necessity to account for oneself; the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.
Anita Shreve
Take a deep breath and exhale slowly. Mentally picture all tiredness, tension, and fatigue leaving you. Visualize that a wave of golden light is entering you at the top of your head and passing throughout your entire body.
Frederick Lenz
Only to a magician is the world forever fluid, infinitely mutable and eternally new. Only he knows the secret of change, only he knows truly that all things are crouched in eagerness to become something else, and it is from this universal tension that he draws his power.
Peter S. Beagle
Former New York Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, former Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, talk show Rush Limbaugh claim – ” don’t you love that, they “claim.” I’m not claiming anything. I’m saying. Anyway. ” – that Black Lives Matter exacerbates tensions and sows racial divides.” How can that even be debatable?
Rush Limbaugh
It takes confidence and guts to intentionally create tension.
Seth Godin
To be a great teacher, you can’t simply be looking at how to earn your income. And with a priest or spiritual leader – there’s another relationship that makes those lives what they are. And in each of these cases you’ll find elements of gift exchange thriving, and you’ll also find a tension around it.
Lewis Hyde
Any time you do action and horror, you’ve always got to try to find a way to make it fresh for the audience, but also for yourself, and there are so many different ways to freak people out and create tension.
Robert Rodriguez
Talking about one’s work releases the energy and tension to do and make.
Henry Moore
My breathing begins to slow. The tension in my muscles starts to relax. Then, a click in the headphones. A slow breath of air. I open my eyes to bright moonlight. And Hannah, with warmth. Thank you.
Jay Asher
Conservatism as an “ism” is always going to be somewhat in tension with a political party.
William Kristol
Damn everything but the circus! …damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inward turning, damn everything that won’t get into the circle, that won’t enjoy. That won’t throw it’s heart into the tension, surprise, fear and delight of the circus, the round world, the full existence.
e. e. cummings
Migration powers economic growth, reduces inequalities, and connects diverse societies. Yet it is also a source of political tensions and human tragedies.
Antonio Guterres
In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, “Whew, at last I’m in a place where I don’t have to worry,” or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner.
Esther Perel
I was never a big fan of horror. I got into it making these films, but I don’t ever see myself doing slasher movies. The kind of horror film I like is The Shining. I don’t really like slashers, but I love thrillers with tension.
Caity Lotz
In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that’s not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I’m still mostly American, but it’s a nice tension.
Patrick Ness
Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.
Henri Nouwen
I’ve always been interested in the tension between knowledge and mystery, between science and religion, and the various ways we cope with the unknown. Some of those are productive; some can be attempts to pin down things that are by nature impossible to know.
Chloe Benjamin
We must do what we can to reduce, not increase, tensions. We must do what we can to present only the facts as we know them, not as we imagine them to be. We must learn to live with crisis in an age which calls for cool heads and accurate appraisals.
Percy Spender
There’s something about a supernatural universe that you would think would actually make it easier to create tension and build conflict and have big scares and big ideas and big sequences. And that’s true in a lot of ways. You can pick the best idea out of a hat.
Julie Plec
What if in my waking hours a sound should ring through the silent halls of hearing? … Would the bow and string tension of life snap? Would the heart over weighted with sudden joy stop beating for very excess of happiness?
Helen Keller
The technique’s many benefits for actors include minimized tension, centeredness, vocal relaxation, and responsiveness, mind/body connection and about an inch and a half of additional height.
Kevin Kline
Growing up in colonial Virginia, if you know anything about that part of the country, there was a number of tensions there. Because of that, you heard the family members talk about Dr. King and many others who were not just speaking out, but sacrificing a ton so that our world, our country could be a better place.
Monty Williams
There’s always been a lot of pressure and tension on the line. If ‘Pi’ didn’t work out, I have no idea what my career would be. I don’t think I would have gotten another shot at it. If ‘Requiem for a Dream’ didn’t work out, they would have called me a ‘one-hit wonder with a sophomore slump’.
Darren Aronofsky
There’s something really interesting about having those close friends that you’ve had incredible times with but growing up and away from them. The underlying tensions, the shifting in the group dynamic, the little lies you tell to big yourself up: it’s something that happens to us all.
John Simm
Eating chocolate can have significant influences on mood, generally leading to an increase in pleasant feelings and a reduction in tension.
Peter Rogers
Everywhere in the world there are tensions – economic, political, religious. So we need chocolate.
Alain Ducasse
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.
Hans Hofmann
As cross-strait tensions between China and Taiwan worsen, the United States must deter Chinese aggression by providing Taiwan with the appropriate support and defense capabilities.
Ronny Jackson
. . .there is an element of Play that is almost ritualistic in Black folk life. It serves to mediate the tensions, stress, and pain of constant exploitation and oppression.
Bell Hooks
When I do only images, people don’t connect with the images because the images are too weird to understand. But when I explain the weird images with straight words, then all of a sudden there is a tension between the two that the audience wants to see.
Signe Baumane
If there are tensions between America and China, we will be asked to pick a side. It may not be directly, but you will get the message that, ‘We would like you to be with us, and are you with us? If not, does that mean you’re against us?’ And that’s to put it gently.
Lee Hsien Loong
The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.
Gaston Bachelard
Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.
Ian Mcewan
Emotionally, grief is a mixture of raw feelings such as sorrow, anguish, anger, regret, longing, fear, and deprivation. Grief may be experienced physically as exhaustion, emptiness, tension, sleeplessness, or loss of appetite.
Judy Tatelbaum
The revolutionary sees his task as liberation not only of the oppressed but also of the oppressor. Happiness can never truly exist in a state of tension.
Steven Biko
If you want to get an audience quiet, just say “abortion” and everybody shuts up and the tension in the room is spectacular.
Lewis Black
Our leadership principles often have tension in them. And I think that’s actually a good thing and it makes sense.
Andy Jassy
L’amoureux qui n’oublie pas quelquefois meurt par exce’В  s, fatigue et tension de meВ  moire (tel Werther). The lover who does not forget sometimes dies from excess, fatigue, and the strain of memory (like Werther).
Roland Barthes
God uses the tension, complexity, and challenge of doing His kingdom work to transform us into champions.
Christine Caine
In Afghan society, parents play a central role in the lives of their children; the parent-child relationship is fundamental to who you are and what you become and how you perceive yourself, and it is laden with contradictions, with tension, with anger, with love, with loathing, with angst.
Khaled Hosseini
We live in constant danger of coming apart. The mystery of why we do not always come apart is the animating tension of all art.
Virginia Woolf
… our diagnosis and treatment of of tension myositis syndrome represent yet another instance of what is possible when the power of the mind is mobilized for healing the body. It’s not magic; it is as scientific as the appropriate use of antibiotics, for science encompasses everything that is true in nature.
John E. Sarno
Why should I be feeling tension? It’s The Daily Show.
Rob Corddry
You must not be afraid of small bits of silence. To use it well is the height of confidence and skill for a comedian. It increases the tension in a good way and adds contrast like a curveball complements the fastball of a good pitcher.
Franklyn Ajaye
A lot of people manage to find common ground and not let disagreements or tensions build up and destroy them, and other people break up or get divorced. I don’t think anything is ever going to change that situation. You simply try to find an accommodation and an understanding with another person and work from there.
Jack Nicholson
It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.
Iris Chang
Prom has all the elements of a popular story. It reeks of all-Americanness, tension, drama. It has romance. Pretty dresses. Dancing. Limos. High school. Coming of age.
Adora Svitak
I enjoy painting. It’s an incredible release of tension, and I feel very excited doing it. I squeeze out some wonderful red paint, and I get a thrill. My heart starts beating faster. It’s almost a sensual thing working with these thick acrylic paints. I almost want to put my hands in.
Stephen Hough
Saudi Arabia isn’t the enemy, but it is a problem. It could make so much positive difference in the Islamic world if it used its status to soothe Sunni-Shiite tensions and encourage tolerance. For a time, under King Abdullah, it seemed that the country was trying to reform, but now under King Salman, it has stalled.
Nicholas Kristof
The easiest way to make something cool is to get cool people to do it. Part of this might mean the president has to forget tensions with opponents, or people like Arnold Schwarzenegger who has actually been decent with oil issues. Maybe he needs to pull some of the cool people in and make them model the right behaviors.
Denis Hayes
A theme I’m obsessed with is the tension between human nature and the frameworks designed to curb the worst and promote the best of it.
Douglas Brunt
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
T. S. Eliot
A person comes home with all the tension of his life, he or she is totally drained due to all the stress they had faced in a days time. So what I think is whenever viewers watch me they should not be more burdened with tension but they should be relaxed.
Rakhi Sawant
Almost all stress, tension, anxiety, and frustration, both in life and in work, comes from doing one thing while you believe and value something completely different.
Brian Tracy
There’s a fundamental tension that is hard to overcome, that what’s wholesome is not convenient and vice versa.
Daniel Lubetzky
I’m happy to have a physical part in ‘High Tension,’ in ‘Hereafter,’ and in a lot of French movies and Belgian movies. But its not by chance directors choose me for physical parts. I like to do that. I like to tell a story also with the body. It’s important, because you can tell a lot of things.
Cecile de France
Clint Eastwood enables and allows things to happen. You walk on some sets and it’s like walking into an emergency room. It’s like, “Come on guys, we’re just making a movie here.” That tension runs into the performances and into the movie.
Matt Damon
Tension, especially with regard to horror, is a very difficult thing to sustain in the big sense.
Bear McCreary
Activities are a real blessing to a family. They provide a way to have fun together, relieve tensions, and develop relationships on new levels with one another.
Gene R. Cook
The greatest contributor to the feeling of tension and fear of war arose from the power of the bombing aeroplane. If all nations would consent to abolish air bombardment . . . that would mean the greatest possible release from fear.
Ernest Rutherford
My film is in French. It’s not something folkloric. It’s who we are. There’s this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I’m on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language.
Philippe Falardeau
Empty canvas. In appearance – really empty, silent, indifferent. Stunned, almost. In effect – full of tensions, with thousand subdued voices, heavy with expectations. A little frightened because it may be violated
Wassily Kandinsky
The joy of suddenly learning a former secret and the joy of suddenly discovering a hitherto unknown truth are the same to me – both have the flash of enlightenment, the almost incredibly enhanced vision, and the ecstasy and euphoria of released tension.
Paul Halmos
Most of conflicts and tensions are due to language. Don’t pay so much attention to the words. In love’s country, language doesn’t have its place. Love’s mute.
Shams Tabrizi
President Obama, when he was elected, he could have been a unifying figure. He could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together. And he hasn’t done that, he’s made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together.
Ted Cruz
Every day I pray. I yield myself to God and the tensions and anxieties go out of me and peace and power come in.
Dale Carnegie
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.
Terence McKenna
Listen to great storytellers; slowly, you will learn about voice, timing, tension, structure, climax – all the things you need to tell stories that will capture the imagination of your audience.
Carmen Agra Deedy
My mother was a single working mother; she started having children very young. There was a tension inside her about who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do and how she couldn’t achieve the things she wanted to.
Natalie Merchant
Holding together a kind of tension. When you see a painting that’s really good that’s what it’s doing.
Brice Marden
I don’t find any kind of tension very productive, I find it destructive, actually.
Shirley Manson
Pessimism and optimism are slammed up against each other in my records, the tension between them is where it’s all at, it’s what lights the fire.
Bruce Springsteen
In Britten or Berg, there’s a tension between the sweet and the sour, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the tonal and the atonal, the happy and the sad. That, to me, is what all western art is about – that tension. It’s why we want to say anything at all.
Stephen Hough
Hence the tension, the anxiety, the anguish of humanity. The more you fight with death, the more anxiety-ridden you will become, you are bound to become. That’s a natural consequence of it.
Rajneesh
If you`re in a Republican district that is leery of President [Donald] Trump,then, you might feel a little bit more exposed.Of course, if you`re in a swing district, then this town hall tension has to worry you which is why we haven`t seen many Republicans from swing districts actually hold these kinds of town halls.
Chuck Todd
I never left jazz. The relationship between structure and improvisation – that constant conversation and tension – I’ve always wanted in every genre and song that I perform.
Lizz Wright
Workers are not being exploited. But if their share of growth doesn’t increase, this could be a potential cause of social tension worldwide.
Kenneth Rogoff
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
Joan Didion
The United States strongly seeks a lasting agreement for the discontinuance of nuclear weapons tests. We believe that this would be an important step toward reduction of international tensions and would open the way to further agreement on substantial measures of disarmament.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
In business, there are times when you disagree, and sometimes it turns out that you’re just plain wrong. Humor takes away tension and helps you realize you’re wrong.
Craig Newmark
Once one understands that ‘racial tensions’ is a euphemism for a black animosity toward whites and a left-wing construct, one begins to understand why the election of a black president has had no impact on most blacks or on the left.
Dennis Prager
I think for any artist, your voice is always evolving. For me, the constant is finding a tension or balance between drama and comedy.
Lisa Cholodenko
In a movie, you need good actors, whereas in a book, you don’t, unless you have a really bad imagination. In a book, your imagination will do the acting for you. Also, the process of revelation is often different. Tension is achieved in a different way.
Yann Martel
My mom let me kind of run free and be rowdy. She encouraged it. I’m a youngest child. So I was spazzy and trying to be funny to my older sisters. It’s kind of my role in the family – tension reliever. I was funny or annoying, depending on your perspective.
Andy Samberg
My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires.
Ingmar Bergman
Over the years I’ve grown more comfortable with making people uncomfortable because that is when growth can happen. You need a little conflict. You need a little tension. And that is part of my calling. A little tough love goes a long way!
Mark Batterson
I’m as anxious as any viewer would be to see what Temple is going to do next. All I know is that in the second half of the season, he’s going to have more sexual tension developing. And it’s a great cast – they’re all Broadway actors except for me. I aspire to that.
Sean Patrick Thomas
Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.
Rajneesh
There are fundamental tensions between the biological reality of the planet and the economic reality. To some extent you can adapt the economy, create a new set of rules and incentives to send it down a better track, but finally people in the first world are going to have to consume a whole lot less.
Michael Pollan
The average session takes about one to two hours. It’s totally amazing because when a person breathes, they go through one stage of relaxation after another, and every stage releases tension.
Leonard Orr
In the ‘Dreamblood’ books, I’m focusing more on what I like about epic fantasy: the layering and depth of tension; the chance to really delve into the minutia of an alternate society and its politics; a large cast of characters to love and hate.
N. K. Jemisin
All I try to do is create an atmosphere that seems comfortable enough, that it removes tension and everyone feels free. If they feel free then behaviour happens, small moments happen and that’s what ultimately works the best for me.
Barry Levinson
Between men and women, all the time there is tension. I feel it. A woman walks down the street, and I’m going back, and suddenly there is this tension. I just walk down the street, we were just on the way. And she thinks I’m a rapist. And now I feel guilty, even though I’m a damn poor did not.
Quentin Tarantino
Of course, when people work together, there can be tension and disagreement. But policing informal behavior makes it hard for people to speak freely for fear they will say the wrong thing. Even self-aware individuals can doubt their judgement and start to rely on the diversity trainer to judge if something is offensive.
Munira Mirza
I suffer from a more complex, persistent fear. It manifests itself in nerves, and on film the camera sees even the tiniest evidence of this. So you have to learn that when the director calls ‘Action,’ you don’t go to this place of tension, but somehow you become free.
Eddie Redmayne
Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps, and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance.
Julian Barratt
There’s a sense you get from the Coens’ work, like ‘No Country for Old Men,’ where you put these characters in situations, and you just let this painful amount of time take place. Part of the tension is just how long it takes to get out of that scene.
Noah Hawley
In a world wracked by hatred, economic crisis, and political tension, America remains mankind’s best hope.
Ronald Reagan
You feel free in Australia. There is great relief in the atmosphere – a relief from tension, from pressure, an absence of control of will or form. The Skies open above you and the areas open around you.
D. H. Lawrence
Without fear I can acknowledge that the authentic Christian tension is not between life and death, but between life and life.
Brennan Manning
People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV’s main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If the main character’s not in jeopardy – physical, psychological, emotional, whatever – then you don’t have any tension, and you don’t have a story.
Stephen Graham Jones
Well, one is inspired by the whole of life, one’s own and somebody else’s. You know how sometimes you hear great music, and music is completely untranslatable into words, into any words. A certain tension that is born when one listens to music could aid you in expressing something absolutely different.
Wislawa Szymborska
When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed.
Russell Baker
Constant slumping increases the stress on the spine and joints, and can lead to headaches, neck and shoulder tension, and lower-back pain.
Denise Austin
Maybe what life needs is a good soundtrack, especially during the long stretches when nothing interesting is being said. A soundtrack might dignify things a bit, ennobling us with the proper drama and tension and pathos.
Jonathan Hull
The really happy man never laughs – seldom – though he may smile. He does not need to laugh, for laughter, like weeping is a relief of mental tension – and the happy are not over strung.
Francis Aveling
There is a tension between our desire to get our kids to turn out a particular way versus letting them develop to be their own person. If there were a pill that would make my child turn out the way I wanted, I’m not sure I’d take it.
Alison Gopnik
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.
George Nolfi
Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension.
David Deida
Thanksgiving without tension is like a Thanksgiving without turkey. It can be done, but it is not the norm.
Mary Schmich
The dimension of depth in the consciousness of religion creates the tension between what is and what ought to be. It bends the bow from which every arrow of moral action flies.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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.
Sue Monk Kidd
Consciousness is the awareness that emerges out of the dialectical tension between possibilities and limitations.
Rollo May
But, in addition, there is, all through the tragedy, a constant alternation of rises and falls in this tension or in the emotional pitch of the work, a regular sequence of more exciting and less exciting sections.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
The dance, just as the performance of the actor, is kinesthetic art, art of the muscle sense. The awareness of tension and relaxation within his own body, the sense of balance that distinguishes the proud stability of the vertical from the risky adventures of thrusting and falling–these are the tools of the dancer.
Rudolf Arnheim
When I was a kid, I was like everyone else: afraid of getting nuked. We had drills in school – Sweden was very close to the Soviet Union. There was definitely a lot of tension.
Dolph Lundgren
On an increasingly crowded planet, humanity faces many threats – but none is greater than climate change. It magnifies every hazard and tension of our existence.
Prince Charles
It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. ‘La La Land’ was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.
Sally Rooney
No painting can exist without the tension of what it figures and what it concretely consists of. The pleasure of what it could mean and the pain of what it’s not.
Marlene Dumas
When you’re a touring musician, you’re always turning over new rocks, and there’s always a certain level of tension in your life. The music business, and the travel that comes with it, is stressful, challenging, redundant, exhausting, exciting, and often very depressing.
Mark Kozelek
No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whosoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties is at the same time delivered from servitude.
Epictetus
A person who suffers from severe locomotor anxiety finds himself in an almost permanent state of mental tension. He wakes in the morning with the anxious expectation of having to go out somewhere in the course of the day.
Karl Abraham
by then I’d figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it’s the gift of feeling floppier.
Anne Lamott
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
Marilyn Hacker
One of the interesting things about comedy is it’s tension release, and nothing creates tension faster than anger.
Lewis Black
You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: There is nothing there…You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: This hum is the silence.
Annie Dillard
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.
George Nolfi
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
William James
My childhood was marked by a tension between privilege on the one hand and emotional dysfunction on the other.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.
Sports allow men to build up situations of emergency. What he then demands of himself is unnecessary achievement – and unnecessary sacrifice. He artificially creates the tension that he has been spared by affluent society.
Viktor E. Frankl
At the heart of every great movie is conflict. It’s the same with a meeting. There should be conflict and tension.
Patrick Lencioni
Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
E. F. Schumacher
In leadership there are always problems to be solved and tensions to be managed. When you try to solve a tension, you create a problem.
Andy Stanley
Sedition involves sloganeering with incitement. It may be anti-national, but not a crime, unless you incite violence or communal tension.
Kapil Sibal
Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they’ve started.
David Allen
Because of the tension and difficulty, I remember trying to do the silliest things when we weren’t rolling cameras, anything to lift the spirits. But once on set, it was important to have full concentration.
Madeleine Stowe
If I’m not nervous, if I don’t have at least a little bit of the same self-doubt and anxious feelings I had when I started playing, then it will be time for me to go on. I must have that tension.
Jerry West
The tension in pro ball comes from the realization that any game could be your last, that an injury could end your career. And in TV, you never know if or when your series will be canceled.
John Matuszak
I’m not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together.
Suzanne Collins
When ill luck besets us, to ease the tension we have only to remember that happiness is relative. The next time you are tempted to grumble about what has happened to you, why not pause and be glad that it is no worse than it is.
Dale Carnegie
In the World Cup, much depends for every team on how it develops during the tournament. There are always rising tensions. They come from within, and they come from the media.
Franz Beckenbauer
Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.
Joko Beck
If you’re a fat person – and especially if you’re a woman – at all stages of your life you’ll get abuse for it, so you have to work out a way of dealing with it. The best way is to be humorous about it – that defuses any tension.
Jo Brand
Leadership is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go.
Dick Morris
Diplomacy is essential if we are to find peaceful resolutions in times of tension.
Ed Davey
The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.
Henry David Thoreau
There’s a tricky tone where you try to get some humor into a movie that’s also a tough tale of murder and revenge. You have to ice skate rather carefully between the humor and the action tension part of the drama.
Walter Hill
For me it’s about creating and sustaining tension for as long as possible, and I’m not generally interested in allowing that tension to be deflated, especially by a jump scare.
Mike Flanagan
It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
Ernest Hemingway
America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future.
Edward Snowden
Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War’s most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty.
Gretchen Rubin
When I listen to symphonies, or long pieces of music, there are so many different moods and movements, and things that are really beautiful going to something with a lot of tension.
John Petrucci
Exercise stimulates your circulation, massages your internal organs, stretches and strengthens your muscles, and energizes you. Exercise is also a great way to discharge tension, work through emotional blocks, release anger, and gain self-esteem.
Ellen Bass
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.
Anthony Powell
Do you agree that when theres tension and an obsession to want to hit the ball is when you hit it worst? You have to be loose.
Enrique Pena Nieto
These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects, ready for intelligent use.
Andrei Codrescu
Find moments in your life in which you had communication with people. You will see that most of our tensions, disappointments , sorrows, pain, and anxiety are the result of a break in our communication.
Torkom Saraydarian
We’ve been worried for some time that one of the ways that North Korea can retaliate against further escalation of tensions is via cyber, and particularly attacks against our financial sector. This is something they have really perfected as an art against South Korea.
Dmitri Alperovitch
In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.
Ben Dolnick
Errors have nothing to do with luck; they are caused by time pressure, discomfort or unfamiliarilty with a position, distractions, feelings of intimidation, nervous tension, overambition, excessive caution, and dozens of other psychological factors.
Pal Benko
What I love most about yoga is that you can make it whatever you need it to be. For me, it’s a time set aside to pay attention to the stress, concerns, and tension that may have infiltrated my system.
Grace Gealey
There is harmony in the tension of opposites, as in the case of the bow and lyre.
Heraclitus
The symbolic value of having an African-American president has certainly eased some racial tensions in America, but they’re not gone.
Naomi Wolf
I did not like ‘The Hurt Locker.’ It’s a lazy way to make a movie, frankly. I could put you on the edge of your seat quite easily, and have you feel the tension for 2 hours, if every other scene practically is, ‘Should we cut the red wire or the green wire?’
Michael Moore
The source of so much of my anxiety in life and the tensions in my relationship is my anxiety about my kid. It’s all very abstract and unfounded and ungrounded.
Lisa Cholodenko
Less tension in the Middle East is always a positive, and any drop in gas prices will essentially act as a tax break for consumers going into the holiday shopping season.
Jeff Duncan
While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving into that anger by looting or carrying guns, and even attacking the police only serves to raise tensions and stir chaos.
Barack Obama
I’ve been diagnosed with what’s called vocal tension dysphonia. The muscles around my vocal chords kind of constrict my vocal chords from doing what they should do. It’s kinda like being a body builder and you have muscles that are so large that they don’t allow you to have flexibility, if that makes sense.
Brian Littrell
Tension is a prerequisite for creative living.
Agnes Meyer Driscoll
The poet resists the pressures of reality, including the pressures of violence, in making, in forming, the poem. The tension is in the resistance – the poem is an act of resistance.
Lawrence Joseph
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
Julio Cortazar
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.
Roy Lichtenstein
That’s what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It’s like riding a horse that’s a little too wild for you, so there’s this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it’s going to do.
Li-Young Lee
Our American history reflects a long-standing tension between people and power. In fact, all government everywhere does. But our American form of government solved the problem, better than most, of moderating this tension between people and power.
Sheldon Whitehouse
But every human path leads on to God;
He holds a myriad finer threads than gold,
And strong as holy wishes, drawing us
With delicate tension upward to Himself.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
Meditation is unfocussed mind, you simply listen silently, not with a tension in the mind, not with an urge to know and learn, no, with total relaxedness, in a let go, in an opening of your being. You listen, not to know, you simply listen to understand.
Rajneesh
Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well – which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me.
G. Willow Wilson
The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension – the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.
Barbara Hepworth
Do you agree that when there’s tension and an obsession to want to hit the ball is when you hit it worst? You have to be loose.
Enrique Pena Nieto
I’m not the voice of reason; I’m more the guy using these offensive topics as fodder to raise tension in a joke.
Anthony Jeselnik
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
George Orwell
I like energy. I like to feel it cracklin’, I like sexual energy in a room, and I like tension.
Patti Smith
There are tensions abroad where people don’t understand our attachment to the freedom of speech, we’ve seen the protests, and I would say that in France all beliefs are respected.
Francois Hollande
What happens when you have great grief in your life is the arteries of that heart begins to spasms down, just literally squeezes down like this because you’re feeling the tension of your life and then the heart muscle itself will also begin – to get stressed out.
Mehmet Oz
I believe that the most important thing…is to revive in the whole Church that positive tension, that yearning to announce Christ again to contemporary man.
Pope Benedict XVI
Tension is an interesting quality – and architecture must have it. There should be elements of the inexplicable, the mysterious, and the poetic in something that is perfectly rational.
Annabelle Selldorf
Mature art, I think, emerges when there’s a certain balance
of tensions, when there’s neither neurotic prostration nor
cold rationality, but an aura of energy and a drive to grasp
personal “truths” still emerging into perception.
To grasp and to shape them.
Earle Birney
If you can hold the tension of opposite points of view in your intimate relationships with people, instead of making somebody right and somebody wrong, you are really taking an evolutionary step.
Connie Zweig
Brexit is the other face of the refugee crisis – tensions that lead to stasis, external risks that lead to asymmetric shocks.
Emmanuel Macron
Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!
D. H. Lawrence
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
William James
In the end, it’s acting, it’s not real. But every director will tell you that you have to create conditions that create tension, because tension is what makes drama feel real.
Paul Greengrass
I used to think that one day I’d be able to resolve the different drives I have in different directions, the tensions between the different people I am. Now I realize that is who I am. I do feel I’m getting closer to the song in my head. I wasn’t looking for grace. But luckily grace was looking for me.
Edward de Bono
With the first out breath, you are releasing worries, plans, mental tensions. With the second out breath, you are releasing physical tightness and tension. With the third out breath, you are releasing difficult emotions.
Tara Brach
I’m very heavily involved in the editorial post-production process, and the camera – it’s just such a big part of my storytelling language. I like creating the tension; I like creating the emotion through the movement of my camera, or the lack of movement through my camera, depending on what fits the scene best.
James Wan
… While nervous tension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension.
Gabor Mate
In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri – where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.
Barack Obama
The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.
Rebecca West
So it helped me to just let go of all my tensions and feelings about that world and say ‘OK, this is for my fans in Japan. They’ll be nice and get into it and have fun.’ And it was the first record I made at my home studio.
Matthew Sweet
Making scary movies and creating tension is very technical and it require a lot of coverage. It requires the stretching of time.
Franck Khalfoun
I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can’t give up love. Maybe it’s the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.
Jeanette Winterson
There are some aspects of work you need to keep working on and no matter what environment you are in. Continuous learning is very important. It’s what I call ‘competitive tension’, which is about having a competition around.
Viswanathan Anand
The bow too tensely strung is easily broken.
Publilius Syrus
I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration?
Thomas Merton
The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand.
David Foster Wallace
The clarity of gender makes possible the human dialectic. Let the lines of balanced tension go slack and the structure dissolves into the ooze of androgyny and narcissism.
Bill Vaughan
I go to the gym every day. That tends to taper off when I’m at a tournament. During tournaments, I’m not trying to build fitness. I’m simply trying to keep away any kind of tension. I go for long walks to clear my head.
Viswanathan Anand
Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.
James C. Collins
I’ve always tried to stray towards characters who are way more faceted than your standard leading man role, and I’ve been fortunate to play some parts who have this awkward tension to them.
Sam Palladio
The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals.
Clay Shirky
Humor helps ease the tension of race and the differences in society. If there wasn’t comedy I don’t know if Obama could have ever become president.
Marlon Wayans
It is just possible that the tensions in a novel of murder are the simplest and yet most complete pattern of the tensions on which we live in this generation.
Raymond Chandler
My father never ran for office or supported anybody for office, and was not engaged in that at all. But I think people throughout the area were just in a constant state of tension – I mean, adults.
Jeff Sessions
I’m a big fan of suspense and tension filmmaking, and that was my goal with ‘The Conjuring.’
James Wan
How we shape our understanding of others’ lives is determined by what we find memorable in them, and that in turn is determined not by any potentially accurate overview of another’s personality but rather by the tension and balance that exist in our daily relationships.
Tom Robbins
Maberry is a master at writing scenes that surge and hum with tension. The pacing is relentless. He presses the accelerator to the floor and never lets up, taking you on a ride that leaves your heart pounding. It’s almost impossible to put this book down. Dead of Night is an excellent read.
S.G. Browne
I urge the citizens of Ferguson who have been peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights to join with law enforcement in condemning the actions of looters, vandals and others seeking to inflame tensions and sow discord.
Eric Holder
I am not afraid of the word tension.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Iraq does have many, many different tensions.
David Petraeus
I’ve been on sets where things weren’t relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.
Kevin Spacey
Conditions for creativity are to be puzzled; to concentrate; to accept conflict and tension; to be born everyday; to feel a sense of self.
Erich Fromm
It is quite typical for Democrats and other political groups to incite or exploit racial hatred, prejudice, or tension for political gain around the time of elections.
Mollie Hemingway
You know, the media and politicians are always gonna be in a bit of tension with one another and probably most of the time that’s healthy and indeed even creative. But it’s where – it’s really when news organisations are used as kind of instruments of politics that it gets tricky.
Tony Blair
Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.
Natalie Goldberg
Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.
Barbara Ehrenreich
A level of anxiety and tension and outright fear that so many people have felt, not only during the recession but during this slow economic recovery since. This made me very much want to up the conversation about how miracle-minded thinking applies to that area of life.
Marianne Williamson
Well, certainly 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.
John le Carre
By god, DH Lawrence was right when he said there must be a dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?
Stella Gibbons
Be modest in your wants…There is nothing that will cause greater tensions in marriage than grinding debt, which will make of you a slave to your creditors.
Gordon B. Hinckley
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.
Frank Zappa
The planet isn’t improvising, it’s creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography, a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components.
DJ Spooky
I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.
Sean Scully
I believe that solution to all problems is in development. Development is also the solution to the tension that people talk about.
Narendra Modi
Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry
Eckhart Tolle
Faith properly informs the religious lawyer or judge, and morality is not in tension with fidelity to the law.
William H. Pryor
I know from my experience in theater that the crowd is different every night; the reactions, the tension. But it’s true for film as well, going from country to country and culture to culture. The difference between California and New York responses, for example. It’s really fascinating.
Christoph Waltz
Feeling a few nerves is necessary and positive. That tension is a good thing: it’s a sign that you’re doing something you like, that you’re passionate about, and about which you have a great sense of responsibility and respect for.
Julen Lopetegui
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.
Nhat Hanh
The sharp knife of dawn glitters in my hand but how bare is everything-tall tall tree infinite air, the unrelaxing tension of the world and only hope, hope only, the kind eagle soars and wheels in flight.
Martin Carter
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.
Robert Morgan
It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.
Ingmar Bergman
When a skater steps on the ice to compete, the nerves, the tension, and sheer suspense of that moment make for great drama.
Brian Boitano
One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.
Adam Rapp
If the pressure is getting to you, whistle. In a barely audible way. It’s the best way I know of to let go of tension. Music gets your mind off the situation, and the act of whistling melts the tension out of your body.
Fuzzy Zoeller
I’ve been fascinated by the world ever since I read ‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdain. I’ve watched ‘Top Chef’ and watched interviews with chefs on ‘Charlie Rose’… I thought they’re really intriguing characters, and they really encapsulate that tension between vision and commerce, art and commerce.
Jon Favreau
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
Quincy Jones
When I introduced a black soldier, Lt. Flap, in 1971, the Stars and Stripes banned the strip. They were having racial problems and thought it would increase the tensions.
Mort Walker
So what does a good teacher do? Create tension – but just the right amount.
Donald Norman
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.
Viktor E. Frankl
The intellect must not be kept at consistent tension, but diverted by pastimes…. The mind must have relaxation, and will rise stronger and keener after recreation.
Seneca the Younger
The sexuality of children – there’s a lot friction there. That tension interests me a lot.
Michael Gira
When there is tension, arguments and money problems, it’s tough to do your work. Some people thrive on that. I don’t.
Richard Jenkins
I don’t like to watch a movie where it’s just kind of like all one note, dee-dee-dee-dee. I want spikes of adrenaline and highs and lows and exciting tension release.
Catherine Hardwicke
What’s disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
Pauline Kael
Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)
Stephen Levine
I’ve become more relaxed. When I was younger, I had more erratic, nervous tension when I was working.
John Singleton
Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.
David Sanborn
Great work is the result of seeking out tension, not avoiding it.
Seth Godin
Learning to savor the moment keeps us from living in constant worry and fear and tension over things that haven’t happened yet and may never come to pass. Practicing yoga helps us to undo these bad mental habits and stress triggers that we often unknowingly pick up along the way.
Tara Stiles
And then they were kissing. Something exploded within his chest burning away the tension and confusion and fear. Burning away the hurt of seconds earlier. For a moment it felt like nothing mattered anymore. Like nothing would matter ever again.
James Dashner
I tend to have a long con when it comes to romance, in part because I like the build-up as much as the payoff, and in part because I think there are a wealth of relationships out there (friend, sibling, rival, etc.), and straight-up romance interests me less than tension.
V. E. Schwab
The proper condition of the human is not bovine placidity… the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne.
Brian Swimme
Many of the ethnic and other parochial tensions that have tended to create insecurity and outright conflict, time and time again, are largely as a result of failure to deliberately undertake nation-building efforts.
Yemi Osinbajo
The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go ’round. It’s not love, it’s that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.
William Safire
Laughter is a release of tension. When influencing, make the other person laugh; you’ll gain rapport instantly.
Marshall Sylver
The thing that’s important for me to focus on is the balancing of the tension between satisfying myself and satisfying an audience, and making something that I think is good and funny, worthwhile, small-“i” important, versus something that’s going to do well.
Andy Richter
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
John Updike
Any band that you have, any relationship in your life, is gonna come with moments of tension.
Robert Trujillo
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death-
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
Philip Larkin
Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.
Lyndon B. Johnson
You can cut the tension with a cricket stump.
Murray Walker
Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.
Howard Thurman
I work as a dancer, but I also work as a choreographer with couples that have a lot of tension between them, and as dancer and as a choreographer, being in this situation is very difficult. You see the energy doesn’t flow, and it’s very tense.
Blanca Li
I think there is too much wrong with the world to ever get too relaxed and happy. The more natural state, and the better one, I think, is one of some anxiety and tension over man’s plight in this mysterious universe.
Woody Allen
Normally you have more adrenaline, and more tension inside your body when you walk in and see the 80,000 fans screaming.
Joshua Kimmich
Let the music defuse all the tension.
Kanye West
The tensions are always based on financial resources. Something like film is very problematic because it is viewed as an art form and also as an industry with a pure commercial base.
Ann Macbeth
Cities produce in me melancholy or a tension I don’t need.
David Guterson
History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.
Richard Lamm
If you have had no tension in your life, never been screwed up by problems, your mortality well within your own grasp, and someone tells you that God so loved you that He gave His Son to die for you, nothing but good manners will keep you from being amused.
Oswald Chambers
It is time for Iran and other stakeholders to begin to address the causes of tension in the wider Persian Gulf region. We need a sober assessment of the complex and intertwined realities here and consistent policies to deal with them. The fight against terror is a case in point.
Mohammad Javad Zarif
I concede that segregation can allay social tensions immediately, but it further debilitates us in the long run.
Richard Benjamin
I think there’s a real tension between capitalism and morality. That’s not to say these systems aren’t powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that’s just a pipe dream.
Michael Pollan
As we free our breath through diaphragmatic breathing, we relax our emotions and let go our body tensions.
Gay Hendricks
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Thomas Moore
If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.
Amit Ray
I think we will be able to work with Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to reduce tension and concentrate efforts in both the countries on real problems of the people – poverty, social injustice, and development.
Rajiv Gandhi
The most interesting characters are those you’re drawn to, then repelled by, and then come to understand. All that tension – I live that. But I don’t plan the tension. It’s just something that should happen.
Rachel Weisz
Tensions and violence in cities across America are reminders of how quickly communities can erupt with an absence of social trust.
Stanley A. McChrystal
When I’m driving, you have a different feeling when the police get behind you and you’re not even breaking the law. The tension is so high.
Yo Gotti
The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.
Stefan Zweig
Meditation is meeting eternity in the present moment. It is resolving every problem as it comes. It is resolving every tension as it creeps in. It is facing the challenges of life in a non-fearful way.
Vimala Thakar
The true genius shudders at incompleteness.
Edgar Allan Poe
Be it caste or communal violence, they stall the growth of the nation. Let us affirm that we will be free from these tensions.
Narendra Modi
I think everybody understood what happened, why this consent decree came about after the Freddie Gray situation. There was tension on both sides.
Al Sharpton
Is it just me, or did 2019 feel like an endless fight? Tension over Brexit and climate-change protests trickled down into our everyday lives, putting pressure on every relationship.
Susanna Reid
I think there is this cliche of Indian men who want a forward-thinking girlfriend but a traditional wife. I think that creates tension in a marriage.
Elizabeth Flock
When I would walk down the runway back in the late 90s, I could feel the tension from others who knew I was transgender. I could see the joy on the faces of people from my community, elated to see someone represent them.
Dominique Jackson
We need some creative tension; people crying out for the things they want.
John Lewis
Space expands or contracts in the tensions and functions through which it exists. Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life.
Hans Hofmann