This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Our actions follow from our characters [but] we are exactly as capable of making our own character, if we will, as other are of making it for us. The free will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the truth which the word “necessity” [“determinism”] puts out of sight, namely the power of the mind to cooperate in the formation of its own character, has given its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of the determinists." - John Stuart Mill
"The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one." - John Stuart Mill
"Fate and necessity are unconquerable." - Joseph Joubert
"The typical American believes that no necessity of the soul is free and that thee are precious few, if any, which cannot be bought." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"To doubt everything and to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both free us from the necessity of reflection." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds, by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education." - Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
"Democracy, it must be emphasized, is a practical necessity and not just a philosophic value." - Michael Harrington, fully Edward Michael "Mike" Harrington
"But repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Necessity has no law." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I
"The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"Necessity! thou mother of the world." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Nature means Necessity." - Philip James Bailey
"Necessity, like electricity, is in ourselves and all things, and no more without us than within us." - Philip James Bailey
"The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." - Plato NULL
"Everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created." - Plato NULL
"Evils... can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to good. Having no place among the Gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the earthly nature and this mortal sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like Him is to become holy and just and wise." - Plato NULL
"Ability and necessity dwell near each other." - Pythagoras, aka Pythagoras of Samos or Pythagoras the Samian NULL
"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religions, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chair by imitation." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If we must accept fate, we are not less compelled to assert liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. We are sure, though we know not how, that necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the times." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Life is hardly respectable if it has no generous task, no duties or affections that constitute a necessity of existence. Every man's task is his life-preserver." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Seldom shall we see in cities, courts, and rich families, where men live plentifully, and eat and drink freely, that perfect health and athletic soundness and vigor of constitution which are commonly seen in the country, where nature is the cook and necessity the caterer, and where they have no other doctor but the sun and fresh air." -
"Man does not choose of necessity... Consequently man wills Happiness of necessity, nor can he will not to be happy, or to be unhappy. Now since choice is not of the end, but of the means... it is not of the perfect good, which is Happiness, but of other particular goods. Therefore man chooses not of necessity but freely." -
"The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of war." - Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
"No poet, no artist, of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according to his necessity: there is no law juster than that." - Thomas Carlyle
"Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting hostile empires - Necessity and Free Will." - Thomas Carlyle
"The necessity of saying something, the embarrassment produced by the consciousness of having nothing to say, and the desire to exhibit ability, are three things sufficient to render even a great man ridiculous." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery." - William Hazlitt
"There is no virtue like necessity." - William Shakespeare
"All places that the eye of heaven visits are to a wise man ports and happy havens. Teach thy necessity to reason thus; there is no virtue like necessity. King Richard II. Act i. Sc. 3." - William Shakespeare
"Nature must obey necessity." - William Shakespeare
"Progress is what happens when impossibility yields to necessity." - Arnold Henry Glasgow
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit. " - Edward Paul Abbey
"Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of necessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other. " - Emma Goldman
"In spite of the universalistic spirit of the monotheistic Western religions and of the progressive political concepts that are expressed in the idea "that all men are created equal," love for mankind has not become a common experience. Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for an individual or as an abstract concept to be realized only in the future. But love for man cannot be separated from love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"By narcissism is meant ceasing to have an authentic interest in the outside world but instead an intense attachment to oneself, to one’s own group, clan, religion, nation, race, etc. — with consequent serious distortions of rational judgment. In general, the need for narcissistic satisfaction derives from the necessity to compensate for material and cultural poverty." - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
"The human understanding is unquiet; it cannot stop or rest, and still presses onward, but in vain. Therefore it is that we cannot conceive of any end or limit to the world, but always as of necessity it occurs to us that there is something beyond... But he is no less an unskilled and shallow philosopher who seeks causes of that which is most general, than he who in things subordinate and subaltern omits to do so." - Francis Bacon
"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." - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself... The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions. " - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening." - George Gurdjieff, fully George Ivanovich Gurdjieff