Free Will Quotes

You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get

~ Angus Wilson

Joan spoke kindly, explaining patiently, as he always patiently explained things to her. “It’s like in that book you gave me, Jane Eyre. Jane says she isn’t a bird caught in a net. Instead she’s a human being with an independent will and that she has a treasure inside her that will keep her alive, no matter if anything bad happens.

~ Cate Campbell Beatty

Your personal declaration of will is the first step in a seemingly impossible journey.

~ Bryant Mcgill

...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.

~ Immanuel Kant

As Lynn writes: What angers me is the loss of control. At any moment someone could come to me, be dressed the right way and use the right code, and I no longer have free will. I will do anything that person requests.I hate them for that. Nothing else is as bad as known that I am always out of control; knowing that I am still a laboratory experiment, a puppet whose strings are hidden from ever but my handlers, and I don't yet know how to break free.p216

~ Lynn Hersha

Free will? Either you follow the word of God, or you'll be punished with eternal hellfire. That's the same kind of choice an abuse boyfriend gives you: 'Either you do exactly what I say, or I'll beat the shit out of you.

~ Oliver Gaspirtz

...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

The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill

~ Chuck Palahniuk

The free-will of men and the sovereignty of God are operationally co-existent, neither Reality impunes the 'co-dependent' authority of the other.R. Alan Woods [2012]

~ R. Alan Woods

Sure, the outcome was favourable, but what was the cost? Wasn't changing the way she felt about something not far from taking away her free will altogether?

~ Cassandra Page

Help others while respecting the Sacred Law of Free Will. By recognizing and honoring God in others, you recognize and honor God within yourself.

~ Human Angels

Getting unstuck is a matter of choice. If you want flourish in life make a choice today to move into that reality. You can do it.

~ Sereda Aleta Dailey

He who falls, falls by his own will; and he who stands, stands by God's will.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man's free will. God does not redeem man against his will.

~ John Paul Ii

To explain the matter I will employ a simile, which yet, I confess is very dissimilar; but its dissimilitude is greatly in favour of my sentiments. A rich man bestows, on a poor and famishing beggar, alms by which he may be able to maintain himself and his family. Does it cease to be a pure gift, because the beggar extends his hand to receive it? Can it be said with propriety, that 'the alms depended partly on THE LIBERALITY of the Donor, and partly on THE LIBERTY of the Receiver,' though the latter would not have possessed the alms unless he had received it by stretching out his hand? Can it be correctly said, BECAUSE THE BEGGAR IS ALWAYS PREPARED TO RECEIVE, that 'he can have the alms, or not have it, just as he pleases?' If these assertions cannot be truly made about a beggar who receives alms, how much less can they be made about the gift of faith, for the receiving of which far more acts of Divine Grace are required!

~ James Arminius

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can’t refuse.

~ Peter Kreeft

In the secret recesses of man's nature the grace is given disposing and enabling him to yield. Though the will must at last act from its own resources and deliberate impulse, it is influenced through the feeling and the understanding in such a manner as to give it strength. It is utterly hopeless to penetrate this mystery: it is the secret between God's Spirit and man's agency. There is a Divine operation which works the desire and acts in such a manner as not to interfere with the natural freedom of the will. The man determines himself, through Divine grace, to salvation: never so free as when swayed by grace.

~ William Burton Pope

A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Oh, as Dean says, nobody is free - never, except just for a few brief moments now and then, when the flash comes, or when as on my haystack night, the soul slips over into eternity for a little space. All the rest of our years we are slaves to something - traditions - conventions - ambitions - relations.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

~ V.s. Naipaul

Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.

~ David Foster Wallace

You are not the happy, unthinking child you have always appeared to be, accepting everything at its face value. You are not just one of the women of the household. You are Renisenb who wants to think for herself, who wonders about other people.

~ Agatha Christie

It is likely to make us think we are not caged. We cannot feel the bars unless we push against them.

~ Erin Morgenstern

Our desires are guided by what we believe to be good or bad; our beliefs are directed by our knowledge; our knowledge, in turn, is again a manipulation of our desires. Our Will, during this inexorable revolution, serves as the force, increasing, decreasing, or at worst, maintaining the pace.

~ Raheel Farooq

This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos –a chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.

~ Isaiah Berlin

It's the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is FREE. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what to the religions do with this? They say, Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us. The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the fact of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.

~ Robert Sheckley

Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.

~ Matt Ridley

Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil.They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense.

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

The greatest of all capabilities of a human being is to become born again.

~ J.r. Rim

Spiritual is criterion, where free will exists in plenty.

~ Gian Kumar

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.

~ Doug Mcadam

Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

~ Neil Gaiman

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.

~ Tom Stoppard

. . . it is presumptuous in me to wish to choose my path, because I cannot tell which path is best for me. I must leave it to the Lord, Who knows me, to lead me by the path which is best for me, so that in all things His will may be done.

~ Teresa Of Ávila

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Free-will doesn't include shit-happens,unless that's the goal of one's intention.

~ Toba Beta

I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.

~ Mark Lawrence

The true free-will ain't a matter of choosing one of many choices...but of creating variety of options, then deciding the best choice of all.

~ Toba Beta

[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous.

~ Robin Mckinley

The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.

~ Terry Brooks