Necessary Quotes

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.

If you are attached to the things of this earth, you should give alms sufficient to enable you to punish your avarice by depriving yourself of all that is not absolutely necessary for life.

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

It was not the people or the Roman soldiers who put Jesus on the cross – it was your sins and my sins that made it necessary for Him to volunteer His death.

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.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

We got a lot of letters of people who didn’t like them, like my own family who thought they were unnecessary and unpleasant and taking advantage of women in a sad situation – I never saw that. And I think that sometimes, you have to take a risk.

They agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

If only I had more money is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment – now and not later.

Philosophers’ Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.