Quotes about free-will
Jesslyn Wolff -
The destination is fulfilling when the path is authentically your own find the courage and forge your own path your essence is at stake
Judas Iscariot The Flight of the Feathered Serpent -
The only thing that really matters is to be. Man is the rest that he has is by addition.
Stephen King - The Waste Lands
Denigrating free will by confusing it with ka was worse than blasphemy it was tiresome and stupid.
Bangambiki Habyarimana - Book of Wisdom
We don’t do what we want to we do what we are allowed to
Bangambiki Habyarimana - Book of Wisdom
You are not what you want you are what you have been made to be
Dinesh Kumar - Destiny Re scripted
The art of making True promises within ones ownself is termed as Will (Sankalp)... for beginners (like me) it is a tough learning and for siddhas they just become that way... effortlessly they sail...
John Perkins -
I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.
Ana Claudia Antunes - The Tao of Physical and Spiritual
If I knew then what I know now I guess it'd make no difference Fate's sure in the way somehow. What's important is the essence. Although we still have free will We also have a whole lot to deal.
Sam Harris - Free Will
Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change of inputs to the system—learning new
E.A. Bucchianeri -
We are the sum total of the decisions we have made.
John Paul II - Love and Responsibility
No one else can want for me. No one can substitute his act of will for mine. It does sometimes happen that someone very much wants me to want what he wants. This is the moment when the impassable frontier between him and me, which is drawn by free will, becomes most obvious. I may not want that which he wants me to want - and in this precisely I am incommunicabilis. I am, and I must be, independent in my actions. All human relationships are posited on this fact.
Robert Rowland Smith - Breakfast with Socrates: An Extraordinary (Philosophical) Journey Through Your Ordinary Day
Although her disobedience is tragic, Eve’s innocence is not all bad. Certainly, that innocfence leads her to make a poor choice - the very worst - but the fact that she makes a choice at all, the fact that she engages the Devil in a debate which could go either way, the fact that she acts without God breathing down her neck - all speak for her free will or, what amounts to the same thing, her margin for error. It is from this margin for error that freedom springs, because you can’t be free to ri
Henry David Thoreau -
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.
Stefan Molyneux - Against The Gods?
We may not yet know the right way to go, but we should at least stop going in the wrong direction.
Percy Williams Bridgman - The Nature of Physical Theory
Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy yo
E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
There may be some truth (atheists) do not need to believe in a god to be good, but then if they do not believe in a god, who do they believe gives the Universal Law of following good and shunning evil? Obviously, mankind. But then that is a dangerous thing, for if a man does not believe in a god capable of giving perfect laws, he is in the position of declaring all laws come from man, and as man is imperfect, he can declare that as fallible men make imperfect laws, he can pick and choose what he
Daniel C. Dennett - Freedom Evolves
Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.
Daniel Delgado F -
Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free.
Frank Herbert -
To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.
Amit Ray - Enlightenment Step by Step
Remember your connection with the cosmos. Remember your connection with the infinity and that remembrance will give you the freedom.
Vicki Keire - Darkness in the Blood
Maybe none of us can choose who we love, Cas. None of the lucky ones, anyway. The only choice we have is how we serve that love. And Ethan’s made his choice. What about you? Are you going to reject it, or make the best of what you’ve been given?
Clarence Darrow - Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom
Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys wh
Clarence Darrow - The Story of My Life
Every instinct that is found in any man is in all men. The strength of the emotion may not be so overpowering, the barriers against possession not so insurmountable, the urge to accomplish the desire less keen. With some, inhibitions and urges may be neutralized by other tendencies. But with every being the primal emotions are there. All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary
Melanie Joy - and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism: The Belief System That Enables Us to Eat Som
It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system. Free will requires consciousness, and our pervasive and deep-seated patterns of thought are unconscious; they are outside of our awareness and therefore outside of our control. While we remain in the system, we see the world through the eyes of carnism. And as long as we look through eyes other than our own, we will be living in accordance to a truth that is not of our own choosing. We must step outside th
Toba Beta -
If there was no free will in men, then there is no sins. When sins happened, it was 'free will' that made them doable. This is true, unless God has predestined human to do and to have sins.
C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain
For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
Jim Butcher -
God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.
Criss Jami - Killosophy
I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?
Dee Henderson - Undetected
Please understand something. God didn’t create evil in the world, but He did create free will, which allowed for the possibility of evil. Science isn’t like that. What you explore and find, God did create. It already exists. When you find it, you are discovering something God made. And everything God created is good. God said so in Genesis. He looked around at everything He had made and said, ‘It is very good.’”“How men use science can be evil, I’m with you a hundred percent on that,” Bishop add
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.
Tony Vigorito -
Free will is the cutting edge of Creation, don’t you see? The word spontaneity derives from the Latin sponte, meaning ‘of one’s free will.’ Spontaneity is the impulse, the purest expression of freedom, and the impulse wants to do whatever it wants to do. But you are afraid of what others think, others who are just as afraid of what you think, and so you pussyfoot along the perimeter of the free-will zone, wilting like a wallflower.
Michael Bassey Johnson - Master of Maxims
Anything that comes your way by force was not meant for you. Everything that locates you on it's own was yours and will be yours forever.
Frederick Buechner - The Magnificent Defeat
If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our freedom not to believe. And in the very moment that we lost that freedom, we would cease to be human beings. Our love of God would have been forced upon us, and love that is forced is of course not love at all. Love must be freely given. Love must liv
E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
You cannot hinder someone’s free will, that’s the first law of the Universe, no matter what the decision.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
I owe my life to God who set me free from all my sins.
L.M. Browning -
Evil demons dwelling in underworlds, Gods sitting on-high, angels battling and protecting. We have become so wrapped up in these stories, and in the in-fighting between the different religions, that the reality of the matter has gone unseen and unresolved. We—humanity—must move out of this adolescence, put down the fairy tales, and take responsibility for our actions. There is no devil to blame, and there is no God to plead to. There is simply you and the choices you make each day—choices that w
Sam Harris -
The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Dean Koontz - Innocence
In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice, no luck, but only consequences.
J.S.B. Morse - Now and at the Hour of Our Death
The most purely free decision one can make—and thus, the highest order of spirit on Earth—is believing in something without evidential knowledge.
J.S.B. Morse - Now and at the Hour of Our Death
The choice to believe is yours. It’s the only thing that truly is.
Truth Devour - Wantin
Our fated untainted soul gives us free reign, only doth backward pull our clouded minds when we ourselves falsely protect from pain.
Robert G. Ingersoll -
No one can control his own opinion or his own belief. My belief was forced upon me by my surroundings. I am the product of all circumstances that have in any way touched me.
Jeffrey Perren - Death Is Overrated
Aren’t you at all curious about your past?” Rhys asked.“No, my present is who I am. Your identity is whoever you choose to be, not who your parents were.”“But as a scientist you know that prior events influence it, and the future.”“In physics, yes. In people, no.
Richelle Mead - The Indigo Spell
I also had to come tonight to apologize. If you need to go to Mexico to finish this process off, then I understand. I was wrong to criticize you for it or even imply that I had some kind of say in it. One of the greatest things about you is that in the end, you always make smart decisions. Can’t always say the same for myself. Whatever you need to do, I’ll support you.
Sereda Aleta Dailey - The Art of Manifesting Abundance
Happiness is a choice, To make a choice is utilizing your freewill to choose. Courage is getting out of your own way to let Happiness happen in your life in Abundance!
Hope Bradford - Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin
Kuan Yin is showing me picture of a windsurfer skimming effortlessly along the ocean's surface," describes Ms. Lees. "While quite skilled, he is nevertheless very focused on the elements around him. The windsurfer is focused upon how to turn the sail. His question must always be, 'what am I going to do with the wind that is blowing right now,'" instructs Kuan Yin: “There are the waves and there is the wind, seen and unseen forces. Everyone has these same elements in their lives, the seen and uns
Erin Fall Haskell -
Channelling is your higher self streaming through in a version your limited mind can accept. There is no such thing as a separate entity, only the perception of it. You are all of it!
Simon Boylan -
Without awareness there is no freedom. Awareness is vital for any possibility of free choice.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Consciousness and free will are necessary in order for human beings to live meaningful lives by supplying agency to our intentions. The innate capacity for consciousness and directed free will plays a linchpin role in making human curiosity a viable concept. We would lack an ability to learn without an inquisitive mind and the ability to act. A premeditated act of human free will enables us to apply what we learn and make calculated adjustments when our plans need alteration. Human beings’ cogni
Richelle E. Goodrich - Smile Anyway
Some decisions in life naturally lead to an unhappy ending, leaving you sinking by degrees in a lake of quicksand. And, unless someone reaches to pull you out, chances are you will drown in the consequences.
Jaron Lanier - You Are Not a Gadget
Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience.... If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to
Lawren Leo - and Visualization
Creation and Free Will are constantly moving, hand in hand, like children traveling along a path full of impulses and inspirations.Through the use of the Dragonflame philosophy they become superior artistic beings able to enjoy and share the fruits of creative labor.
Isaac B. Singer -
We must believe in free will. We have no choice.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.
Autumn Christian - The Crooked God Machine
if you truly want to know why I'm helping you, you won't get any easy answers. It's not because I believe in the goodness of humankind. It's not because I believe God and the rest of the monsters are evil. I only wish to have the capacity to change. To know that we have the ability to take a different direction than the one presented to us. That is more important than good and evil. Than life or death.
Loraine Boettner - The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination
This doctrine of total inability which declares that men are dead in sin does not mean that all men are equally bad, nor that any man is as bad as he could be, nor that anyone is entirely destitute of virtue, nor that human nature is equal in itself, nor that man’s spirit in inactive, and much less does it mean that the body is dead. What is does mean is that since the fall, man rests under the curse of sin, that he is actuated by wrong principles, and that he is wholly unable to love God, or to
J.D. Stroube - Caged in Darkness
No one has free will until they are an adult, and by then the choices that were made for them, have already set them on a course that gives limited freedom in the choices to be made.
Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don’t whip me, I won’t work." He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him. This is a tragedy, however, only if you presume that the cart of civilization, "the system," is pulled by mules. This is a common,
Charlotte Eriksson -
I am not a Sunday morning inside four wallswith clean bloodand organized drawers.I am the hurricane setting fire to the forestsat night when no one else is aliveor awakehowever you choose to see itand I live in my own flamessometimes burning too bright and too wildto make things lastor handlemyself or anyone elseand so I run.run run runfar and wideuntil my bones ache and lungs splitand it feels good.Hear that people? It feels goodbecause I am the slave and ruler of my own bodyand I wish to do wi
Michael Grant - Gone
I believe in free will. I think we make our own decisions and carry out or own actions. And our actions have consequences. The world is what we make it. But I think sometimes we can ask God to help us and He will.
Steven L. Peck - A Short Stay in Hell
It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
Nothing can enslaved us, if we free in our minds.
G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
Pierre-Simon Laplace -
We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to
Stanisław Lem - Solaris
So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds
Sultan Alsasi -
Coaching is like a magic mirror, reflecting what you are thinking, feeling and saying about everything in life. By working together, you'll understand your own mirror and break all the boundaries to become limitless
shashidhar sa -
Today Never Comes, Tomorrow Never Stops
C.S. Lewis - The Great Divorce
Time is the very lens through which ye see—small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope—something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might
Roger Zelazny - Power & Light
Then you must reconcile yourself to the fact that something is always hurt by any change. If you do this, you will not be hurt yourself.
H. Rider Haggard - She
Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?
Ashim Shanker - Sinew of the Social Species
Perhaps, there is no such person who can be called truly free, but only those who can be deemed so by comparison.
Ellis Peters - The Potter's Field
Every man has within him only one life and one nature ... It behooves a man to look within himself and turn to the best dedication possible those endowments he has from his Maker. You do no wrong in questioning what once you held to be right for you, if now it has come to seem wrong. Put away all thought of being bound. We do not want you bound. No one who is not free can give freely.
Dr. Jacinta Mpalyenkana - MBA
The only true, unchallenged, and un-legalized free-will we have is internal.
Malala Yousafzai - I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
When the whole world is silent,Even one voice becomes powerful.
James C. Crumbaugh - Logotherapy: New Help for Problem Drinkers
But in actuality, the assumption that there is no freedom leads to the exact opposite of order in human behavior. If we all really felt we were not free to make our own choices of how to face and deal with the conditions set for us by heredity and environment, we would also feel no responsibility for our behavior. And we would be right. We couldn’t be blamed for action over which we had no control, so we would make no real effort to act responsibly. We would give free rein to our passions on the
Harsha Yardi - Ashtavakra Gita: The Ultimate Solace
The goal of spirituality is total and permanent freedom from psychological sorrows and sufferings. This is only possible when we will stop taking birth as individuals again and again.What makes us an ‘Individual’? The ignorance.What kind of ignorance? Our idea about our self that ‘I am an individual’.
Baali -
Blue for everyone but it was not for freedom.Just like you, like me
Albert Einstein -
Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er w
Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
If this is truly the time that will decide, we have no business refusing people who feel the way we do. No right to decide that they must huddle in their homes waiting to see if they are still slaves or not when the summer ends.
Susan B. Anthony -
No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.
Christian Hunt - The Dawn of Grace
The mother of goodwill is freewill, if untainted by evil.
Nikki Rowe -
How wrong we are to ignore our hearts to follow the familiar path.
E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.
Madeleine K. Albright -
What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.
Søren Kierkegaard -
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.
Sam Harris - Free Will
You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.
Toba Beta - My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
War between free-will and predestination makes the idea of time travel is still too difficult to digest.
Munia Khan -
Imprisoned peace sets the war free
Vivake Pathak - God and Destiny
The future is just a projection of the past.
Haroutioun Bochnakian - The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Until now, human organization could only be based upon something negative which could not be conquered: SCARCITY, and something false: PERSONAL ACCOUNTABILITY... No wonder instead of producing stability, it produced the exact opposite.The current human organization based upon dealing with the consequences of scarcity and being considered responsible for our individual characteristics which we could never have chosen (our nature, our nurture, our “soul”, and all the choices they engender), will a
Rob Bell - and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived
Love demands freedom. It always has, and it always will. We are free to resist, reject, and rebel against God's ways for us. We can have all the hell we want.
Jarett Sabirsh - Love All-Knowing: An Epic Spiritual Poem
the subject of free will another debated topicdo we or don't we have the ability to pick?greatly controlled by mind at lower levels of consciousnessalmost non-existent, one's free will is notably lessat this level one’s actions are purely reactionarylacking self-awareness, animal instincts are primarynot going along with the mind, free will increasesthen higher up, it's surrendered until it ceasesthus, there both is and is not the capacity to chooseeven when we do it's limited by one's viewschoo
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
Original sin is a self-initiating act because it evidences human free will. If humanity were devoid of free will, it would relegate humankind to living by instinct. A person who lives by instinct might survive for an enviable period, but they will never live a heroic existence. Every hero’s story commences with an unsatisfied and optimistic person venturing out from the comfortable confines of their common day world, facing forces of fabulous power, and fighting a magnificent personal battle. Th
Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life
The ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in""Fermat's principle sounds weird because it describes light's behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: "Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.
Kate Chopin -
What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! Free! Body and soul free! She kept whispering.