Necessity And Luxury Quotes & Sayings

The American Negro must rebuild his past in order to make his future. Though it is orthodox to think of America as the one country where it is unnecessary to have a past, what is a luxury for the nation as a whole becomes a prime social necessity for the Negro. For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generation must repair and offset. — Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

I am sure you understand that a reputation for ruthlessness can be useful. A great ruler, especially one of as wide and various a country as Gurkhul, must first be feared. He would desire to be loved also, but that is a luxury. Fear is essential. Whatever you may have heard, Uthman is neither a man of peace, nor of war. He is a man of ... what would be your word? Necessity. He is a man of the right tool at the right time. — Joe Abercrombie

When I'm living in the world of luxury and celebrity, which is where I found myself for a large part of my life, it's a walk-on part. Not a vital necessity, like it is for so many people. I enjoy it but I can see right through it! — Agnetha Faltskog

The necessity of every one paying in his own labor for what he consumes, affords the only legitimate and effectual check to excessive luxury, which has so often ruined individuals, states and empires; and which has now brought almost universal bankruptcy upon us. — Josiah Warren

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. — Will Durant

It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. — Seneca.

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Rich people are the experimental ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it's developed and passed on. — Milton Friedman

In these days of political, personal and economic disintegration, music is not a luxury, it's a necessity; not simply because it is therapeutic, nor because it is the universal language, but because it is the persistent focus of our intelligence, aspiration and goodwill. — Robert Shaw

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you, is such a man free? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The luxury of today is the necessity of tomorrow. Every advance first comes into being as the luxury of a few rich people, only to become, after a time, an indispensable necessity taken for granted by everyone. Luxury consumption provides industry with the stimulus to discover and introduce new, things. It is one of the dynamic factors in our economy. To it we owe the progressive innovations by which the standard of living of all strata of the population has been gradually raised. — Ludwig Von Mises

Understanding different national, cultural, and religious traditions is no longer a luxury; it is now a necessity and must become a priority. The — Karen Armstrong

It is a truism that education is no longer a luxury. Education in this day and age is a necessity. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Wrestling with work-life balance is a luxury when working to support a family is a necessity rather than a choice. I think that focus is only partially a result of these tough economic times. I think it also reflects a bit of "having it all fatigue": women are worn out from feeling the pressure to excel at work, and be the perfect mom at home. — Willow Bay

The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life. — Vita Sackville-West

As I came down from the mountain, I recalled how, not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources - it's a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one's senses. I — Pico Iyer

Fear, anger, jealousy, hatred of self and others are the outcomes of the lack of connectivity with your inner self. Connecting with your inner self and awakening your inner sensuality is not a luxury anymore, but it has become the necessity. — Vishwas Chavan

Telephones are a virtual necessity - not a luxury - and the revenues collected by this tax flow into the general fund. But this once temporary tax remains and costs American taxpayers, our small businesses and families almost $6 billion dollars a year. — Mike Fitzpatrick

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative - not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury - strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Neither should the theater in our country be regarded as a luxury. It is a necessity because in order to make democracy work the people must increasingly participate; they can't participate unless they understand; and the theater is one of the great mediums of understanding. — Hallie Flanagan

Luxury, not necessity, is the mother of invention. Every artifact is somewhat wanting in its function, and that is what drives its evolution. — Henry Petroski

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

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. — Edward Abbey

Speak the truth.
Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently,
and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power.
Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence.
All growth is not good.
The environment is a necessity, not a luxury.
There is such a thing as enough. — Donella Meadows

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive. — Margaret Atwood

Prayer, even more than eating or sleeping, is not a luxury but a necessity, and we are only fully human when we remember this and arrange our life accordingly. — Sheila Cassidy

Even in challenging economic times, making sure that study abroad is part of our college students' education is a vital investment. If we want a new generation of leaders and innovators who can be effective in an ever more globalized world, sending our students overseas is not a luxury. It's a necessity. — Rick Steves

Coming to know the hidden and forgotten Mother and the marvelous wisdom of the sacred feminine as revealed from every side and angle by the different mystical traditions is not luxury; it is, I believe, a necessity for our survival as a species. — Andrew Harvey

We live in a time when science is validating what humans have known throughout the ages: that compassion is not a luxury; it is a necessity for our well-being, resilience, and survival. — Joan Halifax

Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible. — Lewis H. Lapham

I replied that England (the dear place of my nativity) was computed to produce three times the quantity of food, more than its inhabitants are able to consume, ... But, in order to feed the luxury and intemperance of the males, and the vanity of the females, we sent away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spend among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, freethinking, — Jonathan Swift

Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury — Joseph Conrad

You. I want you and I don't want to be a luxury. I want you to need me. I want you to not be able to concentrate because you're thinking about me. I want you to reach for your phone because you thought of something you have to share with me. I want you to not even be able to breathe at the thought of never seeing me again, because that's how I feel about you, Paige. I want to be a necessity. — Shannon Stacey

Happiness is not a luxury. It is a necessity. When we are happy, we are in the best possible place to be good to ourselves and those we love. — Suze Orman

These days, when people compete for ever more imaginative ways to make themselves stand out, when all of life is one big exhibition and if it's not on Facebook and Twitter it's like it never happened, I suppose many people would enjoy standing out. But that's because they don't have to stand out. Standing out is their luxury, not their necessity. — Rose Waldman

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are. — Anais Nin

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. — Audre Lorde

Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life. — Susan B. Anthony

Common people tend to term any kind of bizarre phenomenon as "paranormal" or "supernatural". They often exaggerate it as the work of the Gods. Behind this belief is nothing but primitive ignorance. Social progress means that people must (a necessity, not a luxury) align their beliefs and behavior to new knowledge and understanding of nature. — Abhijit Naskar

Humans need Jesus Christ as a necessity and not as a luxury. You may be pleased to have flowers, but you must have bread ... Jesus is not a phenomenon, He is bread: Christ is not a curiosity, He is water. As surely as we cannot live without bread, we cannot live truly without Christ: If we know not Christ we are not living, our movement is a mechanical flutter, our pulse is but the stirring of an animal life. — Joseph Parker

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked. — Amor Towles

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance. — Giambattista Vico

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy
nor a social convention
nor a dispensable, subjective luxury ... Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival
not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life. — Ayn Rand

Mother Teresa, when asked about her holiness or saintliness, always answers in a matter-of-fact way that holiness is a necessity of life--and explains that it is not the luxury of a few, such as those who take the course of religious life, but is "a simple duty of all. Holiness is for everyone. — Lucinda Vardey

Harmony also is not a luxury, it is an evolutionary necessity, if we are to advance further. And harmony cannot be compromised for any book in the world, no matter how ancient, or who wrote it. — Abhijit Naskar

This withdrawal from the day's turmoil into creative silence is not a luxury, a fad, or a futility. It is a necessity, because it tries to provide the conditions wherein we are able to yield ourselves to intuitive leadings, promptings, warnings, teachings, and counsels and also to the inspiring peace of the soul. It dissolves mental tensions and heals negative emotions. — Paul Brunton

Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life ... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet. — Vita Sackville-West

I think our love was all the better for being stretched out by our necessity to study hard to keep up with our work. To have all the time in the world to devote to love may be idyllic for a summer, but linked sweetness long drawn out is the greater luxury. [ ... ] During these summer absences, I longed for her, and wrote to her, and loved her more than ever, abstinence sharpening the appetite. — Robertson Davies

Dare we care at all about current fashions if that means reducing our ability to help hungry neighbors? How many more luxuries should we buy for ourselves and our children when others are dying for lack of bread? — Ronald J. Sider

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the
cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive.
We also instinctively recognized poshlust-not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason
that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity.
What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely
alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between
your savior and your executioner. — Azar Nafisi

But quality of work can be expected only through personal satisfaction, dedication and enjoyment. In our profession, precision and perfection are not a dispensible luxury, but a simple necessity. — Niklaus Wirth

Necessity invented stools,
Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs,
And luxury the accomplish'd Sofa last. — William Cowper

Our mind has evolved in such a way that new wants keep appearing in it relentlessly. But do not confuse them with needs. Needs are necessity, but wants are luxury. — Abhijit Naskar

We should not...think of our fellowship with other Christians as a spiritual luxury, an optional addition to the exercises of private devotion. We should recognise rather that such fellowship is a spiritual necessity, for God has made us in such a way that our fellowship with himself is fed by our fellowship with fellow Christians, and requires to be so fed constantly for its own deepening and enrichment. — J.I. Packer

Higher education cannot be a luxury reserved just for a privileged few. It is an economic necessity for every family. And every family should be able to afford it. — Barack Obama