Vittorio Alfieri Quotes

Stern is the visage of necessity.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.

Well it's a drastic procedure by your standards and mine, but for the people who are living in desperation perhaps the best way to understand it is that it seems no more drastic to them than circumcision.

Nothing has more strength than dire necessity.

But I really believe that you don't do music because you want to, you do it because you have to.

What would it take for me to eat human flesh? If that was the only way to stay alive, I would. I would eat anything.

Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows--it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.

In the most important areas, as individuals and countries, we don't change our behavior until we have our backs to the wall.

There can be powerful magic in acts of desperation.

Necessity is harsh. Fate has no reprieve.

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

Thus does the unyielding, inescapable future ineluctably devour the present.

In the end, the Wheel crushes us all.

Ability and necessity dwell near each other.

Urgent necessity prompts many to do things, at the very thoughts of which they perhaps would start at other times.

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

We shall not lightly talk about sacrifice until we are driven to the last extremity which makes sacrifice inevitable.

The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose.

The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

Desperation can make a person do surprising things.

All things happen by virtue of necessity.

Let the worst come to the worst.

The force of necessity is irresistible.

Cormac interrupted. 'Maybe I oughta shoot you both, put you both out of your misery.