Necessity And Contingency Quotes

There is no necessity to crucify yourself upon a cross of your own making. ~ Steven Redhead

Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does
not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is
preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.
(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly
expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever
failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self
is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the
self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is
thus omnipotent and completely free - but only in phantasy. Once it
commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation
- not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to
subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and
free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and
freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it
becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom
can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness
in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated
by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to
be kept apart. ~ R.D. Laing

For if God is a title of the highest power, He must be incorruptible, perfect, incapable of suffering, and subject to no other being; therefore they are not gods whom necessity compels to obey the one greatest God. ~ Lactantius

Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake. It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs. ~ Gustave Le Bon

In television, you are of necessity working in bits and pieces and scenes, and things are out of order, and you never can have the same sense of how will this look when it's all put together, what will the effect be. ~ Zeljko Ivanek

Let's be clear about what people never say about Playboy on television. It was nothing more than an instrument for onanism. That's what it was. And the Internet co-opted that industry of self- gratification. There is no necessity for lonely men or teenagers to use Playboy. It turns out no one bought that magazine for the articles ever; it was used for only one thing. ~ Greg Gutfeld

Devotion to self is necessary. First, place the mask on yourself and breathe deeply. Then help the others. If you don't save yourself, they will die. ~ Dan Groat

Obliteration bombing of civilian populations had come to be seen as a military necessity. A terrible evil had been defended as a way to a greater good. After the bomb, all sorts of moral compromises were easier - nearly two million abortions a year seemed a mere matter of freedom of choice, and the plight of the poor in the world's richest nation was a matter of economic necessity. ~ William H. Willimon

...anyone who chooses to make fishing his occupation solely for the money is in the wrong business. If no thrill is experienced in catching fish, no satisfaction in going to sea and returning to shore, no pride in exclaiming "I am a fisherman," then a life on the water will be unfulfilling, perhaps even unbearable. Among the unhappy with whom I am acquainted, perhaps the most miserable people are those who fish out of necessity rather than out of a love of the sea and the seafaring life. I have always maintained that when I no longer feel a thrill, satisfaction, and pride from fishing, I will start a new career. (pp. 248-249) ~ Linda Greenlaw

Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Insurrection, never so necessary, is a most sad necessity; and governors who wait for that to instruct them are surely getting into the fatalest course. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Many individuals are so constituted that their only thought is to obtain pleasure and shun responsibility. They would like, butterfly-like, to wing forever in a summer garden, flitting from flower to flower, and sipping honey for their sole delight. They have no feeling that any result which might flow from their action should concern them. They have no conception of the necessity of a well-organized society wherein all shall accept a certain quota of responsibility and all realize a reasonable amount of happiness. They think only of themselves because they have not yet been taught to think of society. For them pain and necessity are the great taskmasters. Laws are but the fences which circumscribe the sphere of their operations. When, after error, pain falls as a lash, they do not comprehend that their suffering is due to misbehavior. Many such an individual is so lashed by necessity and law that he falls fainting to the ground, dies hungry in the gutter or rotting in the jail and it never once flashes across his mind that he has been lashed only in so far as he has persisted in attempting to trespass the boundaries which necessity sets. A prisoner of fate, held enchained for his own delight, he does not know that the walls are tall, that the sentinels of life are forever pacing, musket in hand. He cannot perceive that all joy is within and not without. He must be for scaling the bounds of society, for overpowering the sentinel. When we hear the cries of the individual strun ~ Theodore Dreiser

We put on a pot of tea, a necessity between these two writing friends. We
could no more imagine writing without this hot sustenance than we could
without pen and paper. We sat at the table to talk shop, sort through our
notes, and make plans for the book. Then we settled down in the sunroom,
giggling a little at the unexpected absurdity of our activity, editing
within arm's reach of each other, like toddlers at parallel play. ~ Mary Potter Kenyon

Too often she had listened to her father discourse on the necessity for peace and consideration of others. She believed in that policy wholeheartedly. The fact that occasionally violence was necessary did not alter her convictions one whit. No system of philosophy or ethics, no growth of goverenment, no improvement in living came without trial and struggle. Struggle, she had often heard her father say, was the law of growth. Without giving too much thought to it, she understood that such men as Rafe Caradec, Trigger Boyne, Tex Brisco and others of their ilk were needed. For all their violence, their occasional heedlessness and their desire to go their own way, they were building a new world in a rough and violent land where everything tended to extremes. Mountains were high, the praires wide, the streams roaring, the buffalo by the thousand, and tens of thousand. It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes. ~ Louis L'Amour

What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.

What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it's well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….

The original meaning of "to have a vocation" is "to be addressed by a voice." The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowals of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napolean, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation. ~ C.G. Jung

If you would improve, be content to be thought foolish and dull with regard to externals. Do not desire to be thought to know anything; and though you should appear to others to be somebody, distrust yourself. For be assured, it is not easy at once to keep your will in harmony with nature and to secure externals; but while you are absorbed in the one, you must of necessity neglect the other. XIV ~ Epictetus

I will not accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty.
The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely. ~ Graham Greene

[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance
to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient "I" as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. ~ Judith Butler

Experience tells me habits are stronger than love, fear, and necessity. ~ Alejandra Diaz Mattoni

She was tortured with desire to see him again, a nostalgia, a necessity to see him again, to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him. 'Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?' she asked herself. And she could not believe it, she remained in a muse, scarcely conscious of what was going on around. ~ D.H. Lawrence

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. ~ Norbert Wiener

No oak trees without acorns' may be a formally true proposition, but that this acorn did in fact produce this oak tree, there and then, is not a teleological necessity; it is a circumstantial occurrence" (OH 104-5). Because history is what happened, not what must have happened, there is no room in an authentic historical explanation for teleological causes. ~ Terry Nardin

How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love. ~ Elizabeth Smart

Freedom and constraint are two aspects of the same necessity, which is to be what one is and no other. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Some individuals have the courage to make it, even feel the need to do so; for them the quest is a necessity, not an option. Most people setting out on such journeys are never heard from again, but part of the romance of any field lies in keeping the dream alive, in not settling for what is familiar and comfortable. ~ Gino Segre

the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

[The doctrine of air] I was led into in consequence of inhabiting a house adjoining to a public brewery, where I at first amused myself with making experiments on the fixed air [carbon dioxide] which I found ready made in the process of fermentation . When I removed from that house I was under the necessity of making the fixed air for myself; and one experiment leading to another, as I have distinctly and faithfully noted in my various publications on the subject, I by degrees contrived a convenient apparatus for the purpose, but of the cheapest kind. ~ Joseph Priestley

No one had ever taught him - and he had never imagined the necessity of learning - how to betray the one person whom you truly cared for in life. The only person who genuinely loved you. How to break that person's heart, whether it be tomorrow, or five years or ten years in the future. ~ Eloisa James

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither. ~ D.H. Lawrence

The more effective the chauvinistic propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments of violence. ~ Hannah Arendt

To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction - both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the 'contingency' of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it (emphasis added).26 In ~ Robert Jensen

I skipped the thirty-one years between 1938 and 1965 and jumped to the section entitled "Junitaki Today." Of course, the book's "today" being 1970, it was hardly today's "today." Still, writing the history of one town obviously imposed the necessity of bringing it up to a "today." And even if such a today soon ceases to be today, no one can deny that it is in fact a today. For if a today ceased to be today, history could not exist as history. ~ Haruki Murakami

They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

It is a strange misunderstanding to make Paul either a fatalist or a particularist; he is the strongest opponent of blind necessity and of Jewish particularism, even in the ninth chapter of Romans. But he aims at no philosophical solution of a problem which the finite understanding of man cannot settle; he contents himself with asserting its divine and human aspects, the religious and ethical view, the absolute sovereignty of God and the relative freedom of man, the free gift of salvation and the just punishment for neglecting it. Christian experience includes both truths, and we find no contradiction in praying as if all depended on God, and in working as if all depended on man. This is Pauline theology and practice. ~ Philip Schaff

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love. ~ Abby Geni

This insistence on a degree of faith in the communicant is also illustrative of Wesley's belief in the necessity for the co-operation of an active faith in man with the gift of God's grace to make the sacrament effective, which is congruent with his whole theology of salvation, with it's blending of the objective and the subjective. ~ John R. Parris

I only watch my movies that I make once, so I can just see how it hangs together, but after that, I don't watch them again. A lot of people have disappeared from Earth that you've worked with, and they make me sort of sad once in a while, and there's really no necessity for me to watch them. I've made them, and it's on film and that's that. ~ Gena Rowlands

Courage is an act of grace when it is not required; it originates from an inner necessity to honor, love, and cherish people, and respect oneself. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death. ~ Charlotte Bronte