Determinism Quotes

My destiny plays with me in such a wayI feel I play with my destiny.

~ Vivake Pathak

We all are characters in a movie.

~ Vivake Pathak

Believe in yourself. Determine to pursue your goals.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Hope is a belief in a better tomorrow.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You can get what you want in life.You must reach out with all your heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Be determined.You can make it in life.You can make all your dreams come true.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

With determination, discipline and hard work all dreams become a reality.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

~ Milan Kundera

Free will, determinism, meaning, existence, etc. are academic problems, not problems in life.

~ Marty Rubin

The will has no overall purpose, aims at no highest good, and can never be satisfied. Although it is our essence, it strikes us as an alien agency within, striving for life and procreation blindly, mediated only secondarily by consciousness. Instinctive sexuality is at our core, interfering constantly with the life of the intellect. To be an individual expression of this will is to lead a life of continual desire, deficiency, and suffering. Pleasure or satisfaction exists only relative to a felt lack; it is negative, merely the cessation of an episode of striving or suffering, and has no value of itself. Nothing we can achieve by conscious act of will alters the will to life within us. There is no free will. Human actions, as part of the natural order, are determined [....] As individual parts of the empirical world we are ineluctably pushed through life by a force inside us which is not of our choosing, which gives rise to needs and desires we can never fully satisfy, and is without ultimate purpose. Schopenhauer concludes that it would have been better not to exist—and that the world itself is something whose existence we should deplore rather than celebrate.

~ Christopher Janaway

Hope: Hold on, persistence effort!

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

He did it because he could not help himself, which explains everything and nothing

~ Johnny Rich

I've been coerced into free will.

~ Brian Spellman

The concept of Free Will makes no sense unless associated, somehow or the other, with Absolute Determinism; it is just as a man cannot walk without gravity arresting and spurring his pace simultaneously.

~ Raheel Farooq

Predictability is not how things will go, but how they can go.

~ Raheel Farooq

Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.

~ Nenia Campbell

No, free will is not an 'extra'; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

~ Raymond M. Smullyan

A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity.

~ Raymond M. Smullyan

Whether or not it is clear to you,no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

~ Max Ehrmann

This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?

~ Max Planck

It is important to distinguish 'pure chance' from 'chance' or 'accident.' Things may happen by chance or accident in a purely deterministic universe...Now there is perhaps a sense of 'could not have done otherwise' in which whether or not a person could or could not have done otherwise depends on whether or not the universe is deterministic.

~ J.j.c. Smart

If it is irrational and hypocritical to hold a minor to the same standard of behaviour control as a mature adult, it is equally unjust to hold a traumatised and neurologically impaired adult to the same standard as one not so afflicted

~ Marin Teicher

Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.

~ Eric Chaisson

Evolutionary biology is imperialistic, overtaking entire fields of endeavor simply by attaching the prefix bio – or neuro -- to their names: bioethics, no comics, even, God help us, neurotheology. Its logic is deployed against helpless laymen as a bully's truncheon or an argument stopper.

~ Andrew Ferguson

Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.

~ Andrew Ferguson

Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.

~ Neel Mukherjee

Individual free choices” can only be the expression of an “individual free will”.The notion of an “individual free will” generating “individual free choices” creates a much needed consequence: personal accountability.Personal accountability is vital for a primitive, immature human organization based on reprehension or praise.The permanent interaction of a unique inherited Nature (and maybe a unique “soul”) with a unique nurture (environment), will always determine all our “individual free choices”, from cradle to grave. It is impossible for the individual to be sentient before birth and choose these two or three unique factors.The logic of holding someone personally accountable for a “non-chosen” choice eludes me.The notion of individual free will can at best be a “gut felt” illusion, but can never have logical relevance.What sort of human (and divine!) organization can be based on the consequence of a “gut felt” illusion?-Our current one; primitive, illogical, unstable and permanently conflictual.Be it for all individual choices or all differences, the definitive ban of the illusionary notion of personal accountability is the missing step that will lead to human maturity.How’s your “gut” now?

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Few indeed are those who get a choice. We do as we are told. We stand or fall beside those who were born near to us, who look as we do, who speak the same words, and all the while we know as little of the reasons why as does the dust we return to.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

~ Brian Greene

Thought isn't a form of energy. So how on Earth can it change material processes? That question has still not been answered.

~ Vladimir I. Vernadsky

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.

~ Adrian Raine

You is not you until you see the path of your faith.

~ Lena Hussain

I know that certain minds would regard as audacious the idea of relating the laws which preside over the play of our organs to those laws which govern inanimate bodies; but, although novel, this truth is none the less incontestable. To hold that the phenomena of life are entirely distinct from the general phenomena of nature is to commit a grave error, it is to oppose the continued progress of science.

~ François Magendie

...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it.

~ Paul Henri Thiry D'holbach

What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.

~ Friedrich Engels

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

~ Corliss Lamont

Genes do not make an individual homosexual. They play their part, but so does the rest of the universe.

~ Johnny Rich

Cleverness have no meanings until you find the stupidity that teach you.

~ Lena Hussain