Themes

"Oh! marvellous, O stupendous Necessity — by thy laws thou dost compel every effect to be the direct result of its cause, by the shortest path. These are miracles..."

"Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature."

"Discite quam parvo liceat producere vitam, Et quantum natura petat."

"Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary."

"Æqua lege necessitas Sortitur insignes et imos."

"Freedom is only necessity understood."

"The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy.""

"What is necessary is never a risk."

"Necessitatem in virtutem commutarum."

"We know not of its presence, though its power Be on the gradual round of every hour, Now flinging down an empire, now a flower."

"From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God."

"You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting."

"'Tis necessity To which the gods must yield; and I obey, Till I redeem it by some glorious way."

"Art imitates nature, and necessity is the mother of invention."

"Necessity never made a good bargain."

"Necessity is the mistress and guardian of Nature."

"Necessity dispenseth with decorum."

"Not even the gods fight against necessity."

"The Citizen, of necessity, must speak to citizens, and therein lies its whole trouble!"

"In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place."

"Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. and people die."

"It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself."

"We declared our intentions to preserve monarchy, and they still are so, unless necessity enforce an alteration."

"Cruel necessity."

"Winning doesn't necessarily mean you're right. History will be a better judge of that."

"Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imagined necessities... are the greatest cozenage that men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretenses to break known rules by."

"Hold it wise … To make a virtue of necessity."

"Thanne is it wysdom, as thynketh me, To maken vertu of necessité, And take it weel, that we may not eschu, And namely that that to us alle is due."

"It is precisely because an ideal is necessary to man that the man without ideals is in permanent danger of fanaticism."

"He detested those in the Order who dressed in three layers of clothing or who wore soft clothes without necessity. As for “necessity” not based on reason but on pleasure, he declared that it was a sign of a spirit that was extinguished. “When the spirit is lukewarm,” he said, “and gradually growing cold as it moves from grace, flesh and blood inevitably seek their own interests. When the soul finds no delight, what is left except for the flesh to look for some? Then the base instinct covers itself with the excuse of necessity, and the mind of the flesh forms the conscience."

"Necessity is an evil; but there is no necessity for continuing to live subject to necessity."

"Ananke must above all be regarded as cosmic force, that is as the ruling law in the universe; thus … the super-personal, cosmic significance of "the All" ruled by Ananke as well, can be accepted as certain. It represents in the universe the inviolability of cause and effect and does so as dual essence, as a mythical personage belonging to the oldest theogony or as the earliest philosophical concept of the mechanics of natural events. The two fuse and need not be separated here; but we must also state that the mythical figure was never entirely accepted in the religion proper, the rites of the faith. Ananke remained an elusive outsider, often perceived as cruel. But it is important that at an early stage religious and philosophical speculation closely linked Ananke to the elements of the world's existence (among which Goethe included her too). Like the intellect, Ananke is said to be a highly refined, non-corporeal substance which penetrates the whole world and touches its boundaries. Altogether she is a force belonging to the extremities of the world; like Pythagoras' Chronos she is the outermost layer of the sphere, encircling the cosmos or being the farthest vault of the heavens. The complete identity of her nature shines through the variously established but actually transparent concepts. She may be ethereal for the same reason that she is occasionally even equated with the ether — the world soul and supreme element — thereby becoming associated with the concept of the immaterial and the omnipresent which fills the world as the divine primal substance. We may quote here … Empedocles's cosmic law that "spreads all over the wide-ruling ether" and which, therefore, must have the same place and function in the universe. Finally one can apply here the universal formula of the beginning, middle and end of all things being nothing other than a variant of the formula of the sphere; however, this expresses the creator of being, instead of being itself. Hence Ananke belongs here as the goddess of wisdom, as Aeschylus called her, for the same reason the inner logic of the entire train of thought ends with her. Finally the question is posed about the divine, the sphere itself, and thus the chain comes to an end, forming a perfect ring. It seems to be good archaic terminology, perhaps not without relation to other, mythical aspects of the idea, that Necessity stands for the Strongest, since domination is ascribed to her as to an old goddess of the universe. In the image of the sphere, where the true existence of thought can alone recognize itself, the non-corporeal Ananke becomes conceivable, being the law that forms the world and holds it together. The entire cosmos, as it were, becomes her image and attribute, and Thales in pointing to her poses a question and simultaneously gives the answer."

"When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."

"For everything that has the possibility of being and of not being, is mutable. But God is absolutely immutable, as has been demonstrated. Therefore it is impossible for God to be and not to be. But anything that exists in such a way that it is impossible for it not to exist, is necessarily Being itself, ipsum esse. Necessary existence, and impossibility of nonexistence, mean one and the same thing. Therefore God must necessarily exist."

"Nature means Necessity."

"Soul of the world, divine Necessity, Servant of God, and master of all things."

"In his metaphysics, Abelard held that God created everything from an inner necessity of his own being. Consequently, this must be the best world possible, because of the ."

"Necessity is stronger far than art."

"Necessità c'induce, e non diletto."

"Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary."

"How base a thing it is when a man will struggle with necessity! We have to die."

"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity."

"Where necessity speaks it demands."

"These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by the scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman."

"The right of a nation to kill a tyrant, in cases of necessity, can no more be doubted, than to hang a robber, or kill a flea. But killing one tyrant only makes way for worse, unless the people have sense, spirit and honesty enough to establish and support a constitution guarded at all points against the tyranny of the one, the few, and the many."

"Necessity turns lion into fox."

"Against necessity against its strength, no one can fight and win."

"The law of necessity dispenses with things which otherwise are not lawful to be done."

"Wo wir unfähig sind, die Gesetze der Notwendigkeit zu erkennen, da glauben wir, frei zu sein."