The New Year Quote by Francis Quarles

Pressure is Quarles's great anesthetic. When "necessity" shows up, fear stops being a moral drama and becomes a logistical inconvenience. The line isn't selling courage as a personality trait; it's reframing it as a side effect of constraint. If you must act, you stop auditioning outcomes in your head. Action becomes less a choice than a deadline, and the mind, denied the luxury of dithering, discovers a bracing kind of clarity.

The aphorism works because it compresses a whole psychology into a neat causal chain: necessity -> action -> fear evaporates -> resolution looks like "fortune's" darling. That last move is the sly one. Quarles borrows the old, semi-pagan figure of Fortune, the capricious wheel-spinner, and tames her with Protestant-flavored pragmatism. He's not claiming the universe rewards virtue; he's suggesting that the world tends to reward the person already in motion. Boldness doesn't magically summon luck, but it puts you where luck can find you.

Context matters: early 17th-century England is a culture of upheaval and obligation, sliding toward civil war, steeped in devotional writing that treats life as trial, duty, and account. Quarles, a poet of moral emblems and spiritual counsel, offers a portable ethic for anxious times. The subtext is almost pastoral: stop fetishizing fear as wisdom. When necessity calls, it also grants permission. And that permission, more than bravado, is what turns resolution into a habit.