Free Will Quotes

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

~ Larry Wall

The process of miraculous change is twofold.  One:  I see my error or dysfunctional pattern.  Two: I ask God to take it from me.  The first principle without the second is impotent.  As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, your best thinking got you here.  You're the problem but you're not the answer. The second principle isn't enough to change us either. The Holy Spirit can't take from us what we will not release to him.  He won't work without our consent.  He cannot remove our character defects without our willingness, because that would be violating our free will.  We chose those patterns, however mistakenly, and he will not force us to give them up.  In asking God to heal us, we're committing to the choice to be healed.

~ Marianne Williamson

Christianity would be helpless without the idea of free will and the idea offree will would be helpless without incongruity.

~ Kedar Joshi

To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist, existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian, existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not eaten by cannibals; but it is essential to the existence of the thrill that he MIGHT be eaten by cannibals. The hero must (so to speak) be an eatable hero. So Christian morals have always said to the man, not that he would lose his soul, but that he must take care that he didn't. In Christian morals, in short, it is wicked to call a man damned: but it is strictly religious and philosophic to call him damnable.All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? - that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Without Christ a people may always have the freedom to do, but never the power to complete.

~ Criss Jami

We must exude a sense of proportional gratitude that humankind’s exquisite texture is composed of a feeling soul and an intelligent will, which people refer to as memory of the heart.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You don't need an entire garden bed, to notice the beauty of a flower.

~ Nikki Rowe

Leaders don't cry for what country can do for them for free. They dream about what they can do for country at high cost.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees.I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing.This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode.

~ Michael Price

If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to inheritance left by our ancestors.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

~ Karl Marx

But I can tell you this: that I am deeply proud of Rebecca. That she made a split-second decision to save the life of her son, turning the wheel of her vehicle so that her side of it would be impacted by an oncoming car instead of his. She gave her life in the exercise of the greatest gift that God grants us—the ability to change the trajectory of history.

~ Dexter Palmer

I began to consider the fact that maybe history is actually the great destroyer of free will.

~ Andrew Smith

The principles of storytelling are immutable, explaining why we see shards of ourselves in other people’s stories. All enduring stories predicate its themes upon humankind’s ability to exercise free will. Without a character’s ability to make choices of how to act, there can be no story. In absence of free will, there is no humanity. Only after God evicted them from the Garden of Eden, could Adam and Eve experience what it means to be human.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The bible doesn't say Jesus had a power to command, only to recommend, which leaves each one of us with an individual freedom of choice. Maybe it's just that there are too many of us making too many bad choices for the good of the whole. He took a bite out of his apple. Too many people and none of us wanting or able to hear the harmony.

~ Bryan Islip

Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

As if each of us might somehow have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

~ David Vann

The question - do we have free will, itself is not appropriate. We should mend our perspective a little, and start asking the question, do we have the freedom of will, based on our experiences?

~ Abhijit Naskar

Every single decision of your life is predicated on the healthy functioning of the prefrontal cortex. Even a slight malfunction in a tiny chunk of neuron anywhere in the PFC would lead to the mental deficit in your logical decision-making.

~ Abhijit Naskar

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

~ Ayn Rand

We will ensure a place for you in heaven, but we will make this place a hell. Religious exploitersFollow us for a greater economy and other superficial dreams, and we will make sure it never happens, ever. Political ClassI search for happiness in all the wrong places because I have been conditioned to believe that happiness is somewhere outside (can't find it within). Common ManYou are absolutely free to do anything only if you do what we say. Society

~ Saurabh Sharma

People who have cut their teeth on philosophical problems of rationality, knowledge, perception, free will and other minds are well placed to think better about problems of evidence, decision making, responsibility and ethics that life throws up.

~ Simon Blackburn

...the magic was a tool, though a natural, mysterious tool. In its awareness of the magic, his human nature had desired to connect with it, to use it. The whisperings were the voice of his own awakening, not the seductive call of a dark power. Using it was not corruption, but a natural extension of his being. And he could control the manner in which he used it. He would.

~ Derek Donais

You invoke a new futurewhen you envision your pastin the light of your present.

~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

The Universe is always delivering to us what we need for a spiritual awakening.

~ Erin Fall Haskell

These were people who hunted for a way to erase the haunted, malnourished gaze from their souls and replace it with their faith in freedom and safety.

~ J.d. Stroube

Your liberty will not be freely given to you.You must be bold to liberate yourself.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Freedom is the brevity to resist detrimental act.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don't. The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.

~ Ted Chiang

In every walk of life, you do have the freedom to choose, but that freedom is based on the perception of the world and yourself which you have gained until that moment of life.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Since we have free will, we create our own reality and virtually everything is negotiable.

~ Shepherd Hoodwin

There is no greater moment in life than that when we discover the unique design which has shaped our lives from the moment of birth, save one:The instant we recognize destiny, accept it and then begin to create the rest of our own lives within it using the power of free will.When this threshold has been crossed, nothing can stop our inevitable journey into the highest good for ourselves and all around us.This is healing.This is actualization.This is integration.This is joy.And it is the birthright of every incarnated soul on this planet.

~ Jacob Nordby

Societal peer pressure to conform runs strong, but as more of us continue to think and act for ourselves, rather than be under the influence of group-think, we begin to make more effective choices.

~ Evita Ochel

The idea of original sin--of guilt with no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives--inherently militates against self-esteem. The very notion of guilt without volition or responsibility is an assault on reason as well as on morality. Sin is not original, it is originated--like virtue.

~ Nathaniel Branden

When our thoughts, at times, wander into darkness... remember we are human and have been imbued with free will to choose the light.

~ Christopher Earle

Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it.

~ Mikhail Bulgakov

Believe it or not, the notions of free will and destiny are not mutually exclusive.Predestination is the universal framework of limits (based on natural physical laws) placed upon us.Free will is our infinite ability to make choices within that framework.Because the universal scale is so great—and most of it constitutes an undiscovered frontier—our choices are only limited by our knowledge, our abilities, and our imagination.To put it simply, the world is such a huge playground sandbox that we will never run out of sand or reach the faraway safety fence of destiny.So go out there and play!

~ Vera Nazarian

Denigrating free will by confusing it with ka was worse than blasphemy, it was tiresome and stupid.

~ Stephen King

We don’t do what we want to, we do what we are allowed to

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

We are nothing but bricks from our cultural molds

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana