Quotes About Free will

Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind.

Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next. And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves will dehumanize us.

The indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold: If my brain is a quantum computer, the brain of a fly is likely to be a quantum computer, too. Do flies enjoy free will?

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin—which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next.

The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.

Free will is an illusion. Humans are nothing but moist robots.

God has loved us first, and he has made us for himself. He "desires" our love, and so he leaves us free, for true love cannot be coerced.

As a bio major, I figured free will meant chemicals in your brain telling you what to do, the molecules bouncing around in a way that felt like choosing but was actually the dance of little gears--neurons and hormones bubbling up into decisions like clockwork. You don't use your body; it uses you.

You and David could both be right. Maybe human beings are programmed … to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other.-Zane

Acknowledging that you do not have complete free will, or complete conscious control, actually increases the amount of free will and control you truly have.

It seems harsh to many to think that God chooses some and rejects others, and does not consider men's worth, that by his own free will he chooses whom he pleases and moreover rejects others. But what is this scruple except a desire to call God to order and subject him to their judgment?

You see how every thing is denied to free will, for the very purpose of leaving no room for merit. And yet, as the beneficence and liberality of God are manifold and inexhaustible, the grace which he bestows upon us, inasmuch as he makes it our own, he recompenses as if the virtuous acts were our own.

In discussing the subject of free will, the question is not, whether external obstacles will permit a man to execute what he has internally resolved, but whether, in any matter whatever, he has a free power of judging and of willing.

Yet we flatter our strength unduly when we compare it even to a reed stick! For whatever vain men devise and babble concerning these matters is but smoke. Therefore Augustine with good reason often repeats the famous statement that free will is by its defenders more trampled down than strengthened.

God (says he), who created all things very good, foreknew that evil would arise out of that good; and He also knew that His glorious and omnipotent goodness would be the more highly exalted by His producing good out of evil, than by His not permitting evil to be at all. He ordained the life of angels and of men, that He might first of all make it manifest by that life what free will could do, and then afterwards show what the blessing of His grace and the judgment of His justice could do.

Hence the unskilful   rashly infer, that man did not sin by free choice.

Love is not in our choice but in our fate.

Life starts out as partly destiny and partly free will, but then you have kids, and it's all destiny.

To me life means the growing of a soul. I do not know why this duty is imposed upon us. I merely know that it is, and I feel that we are given much latitude of free will.

To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.

We're what our choices make us. What you didn't choose isn't part of you. What you do about it will be.

This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries.

Ontologically, chocolate raises profoundly disturbing questions: Does not chocolate offer natural revelation of the goodness of the Creator just as chilies disclose a divine sense of humor? Is the human born with an innate longing for chocolate? Does the notion of chocolate preclude the concept of free will?

Freedom is such a gift.