Quotes About Free will

It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

You have been educated in judgment, which is the essence of worship. Judgment always occurs in the past. It is past-thinking. Will, free or otherwise, is concerned with the future. Thinking is the performance of the moment, out of which you use your judgment to modulate will. You are a convection center through which past prepares future. —Dwarf MacIntosh, Kelpmaster, from Conversations with the Avata

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.

Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He saw it!

I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will. —INSCRIPTION ON THE STOREHOUSE AT DAR-ES-BALAT

holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.   —

Actually, he said, it's not my job to improve things here, as you put it, and if you said that to someone like the examining magistrate you'd be laughed at or punished. I certainly wouldn't have become involved in these matters of my own free will, and I would never have lost any sleep over the shortcomings of this judicial system. But because I was supposedly placed under arrest - I've been arrested, you see - I've been forced to take action in my own behalf.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will." Jawaharlal Nehru

Only a moral monster would refuse to save persons when salvation is absolutely unconditional and solely an act of God that does not depend on free will.

People who say that Calvinists teach predestination and deny free will, and that Arminians deny predestination and teach free will are simply wrong.

Look, what do you think it matters to me, all that - all that business of - of the body? Do you suppose I actually picked you, of my own free will? As if I'd gone out shopping and decided you were the best buy for the money? I had no choice at all... You're you, and there's no one, nothing else. We talk about 'falling' in love. Well, I 'fell.

The flower inside the fruit that is both its parent and its child. Decadent as ancestors. The portal and that which passes. Nuclear devices activated, and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs, like paste into strings into paste again, and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time. And when the machine stops, time was an illusion that we created free will.

If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.

Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But

what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.

Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the most creative among us – but passive slaves to the laws of physics that govern our neurons?

People think that what God wills must inevitably take place. This is by no means the case. God wills a great deal of blessing for His people that never comes to them. He wills it most earnestly, but they do not will it, and it cannot come to them. This is the great mystery of man's creation with a free will but also of the renewal of his will in redemption, that God has made the execution of His will dependent on the will of man in many things.

Our sense of free will results from a failure to appreciate this: We do not know what we intend to do until the intention itself arises. To understand this is to realize that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose.

The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law, distinct from "a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system" (United States v. Grayson, 1978).