Free Will Quotes - Page 4

• The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate.

  Stephen Hawking

  Fate, Law, May

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• There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.

  Clarence Darrow

  Men, Race, Evil

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• I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Atheist, Pain, Struggle

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2011). “The Will to Power”, p.294, Vintage

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• Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.

  Marvin Minsky

  Law, Brain, Fixed

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• Whether or not we have personality disturbances, whether or not we have the ability to overcome deficiencies of early environment, is like the answer to the question whether or not we shall be struck down by a dread disease: "it's all a matter of luck." It is important to keep this in mind, for people almost always forget it, with consequences in human intolerance and unnecessary suffering that are incalculable.

  John Hospers

  People, Personality, Luck

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• To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement.

  B. F. Skinner

  Men, Giving, Definitions

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• Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Order, Suffering

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Freedom, Men, Essence

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• Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

  Aleister Crowley

  Law, Political, Politics

  Book of the Law (1909)

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• Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.

  Albert Camus

  Greek, Boundaries, Reason

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.190, Vintage

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• We have nothing to do, but to choose what is right, to be steady in the pursuit of it, and leave the issue to Providence.

  Samuel Richardson

  Issues, Pursuit, Providence

  Samuel Richardson (1862). “Clarissa; Or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprenhending the Most ...”, p.90

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• You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will.

  Epictetus

  Legs, May, Zeus

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• It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense, God himself has told us that God wishes things which do not happen because man does not wish them! Thus the rights of men are immense, and his greatest misfortune is to be unaware of them.

  Joseph de Maistre

  Men, Rights, Wish

  Joseph De Maistre (2011). “The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions: Studies on Sovereignty, Religion, and Enlightenment”, Transaction Publishers

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• The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Funny, Fashion, Sex

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• God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

  God, Philosophical, Art Of War

  Niccolo Machiavelli (2010). “The Prince”, p.106, FastPencil Inc

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• The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

  Walter Bagehot

  Sleep, Men, Intellectual

  Walter Bagehot, Richard Holt Hutton (1891). “The Works of Walter Bagehot ...”

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• Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

  Cesare Pavese

  Power, Single Relationship, Disposition

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.72, Transaction Publishers

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• Free-will doctrine-what does it? It magnifies man into God. It declares God's purposes a nullity, since they cannot be carried out unless men are willing. It makes God's will a waiting servant to the will of man, and the whole covenant of grace dependent on human action. Denying election on the ground of injustice, it holds God to be a debtor to sinners.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Men, Waiting, Grace

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• And one who is just of his own free will shall not lack for happiness; and he will never come to utter ruin.

  Aeschylus

  Literature, Ruins

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• Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting empires, - Necessity and Free Will.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Freedom, Light, Two

  "Essays on Goethe (Goethe's Works)". Book by Thomas Carlyle, 1888.

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• And I will go as far as Martin Luther, in that strong assertion of his, where he says, "If any man ascribes any of salvation, even the very least, to the free-will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ aright."

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Men, Grace

  "God's Will, Man's Will and Free Will".

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• You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.

  Hillary Jordan

  Children, Believe, Thinking

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• You have nothing to lose. All that you can lose is your tension and your worry, your little-mindedness, fear, and anxiety. And fear and anxiety, tension and worry in the small, little mind will keep the mind from being free, will keep the mind from experiencing its infinite potential, will keep the mind from becoming more powerful on this planet.

  Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

  Powerful, Worry, Anxiety

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• If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

  Stephen Hawking

  Doe, Way, Action

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• The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Mind, Action, Humans

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”, p.382, Wildside Press LLC

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