Quotes About Free will

Men believe themselves to have free will because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined. —BARUCH SPINOZA

Regardless of whether people have free will, human flourishing requires that they live in an environment in which they are treated as if they did.

Those who can hear the whisper as you heard it will have to make a decision in the struggle. Will they part with some hard earned bucks to buy the book or pass it by? See, they get to make a choice in the struggle with their own free will and they have to put some effort into the struggle to get the book, just like you did. Will they choose right or will they choose wrong? It's a fork in the path of their existence that they face and no one can give them a free ride down the right path.

We too often look to God to fix everything. God didn't create our problems. This is our doing. We have free will. And this is what we choose to do with it. We can accept responsibility for our thoughts as well as our actions. We can choose something different. We can choose love. And we can create a beautiful garden.

This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts would tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.

Each man follows his own path - his own destiny, if you will. And only he is responsible for the choice.

Tonight, however, all I can think of is the juxtaposition of destiny and free will, and whether it makes no difference what I do, or all the difference in the world.

God created strategy by allowing choice,

F]ortune governs one half of our actions, but even so she leaves the half more or less in our power to control." Even in this area of apparent control, it would be necessary to adapt to circumstances. Free will suggested the possibility of fitting events to an established character; Machiavelli suggested that the character would be shaped by events.

I was very fierce and very driven at eighteen. But my basic philosophy I think has stayed the same, I'm still an atheist, I still believe strongly in the power of free will (despite the mysticism in my prose). I don't believe in the notion of a pre-ordained destiny, and I think because of the sudden death of my father at sixteen I learnt then that it is essential to live life to the fullest as it could be snatched away at any second.

People, Reacher was certain about. Dogs were different. People had freedom of choice. If a man or a woman ran snarling toward him, they did so because they chose to. They were asking for whatever they got. His response was their problem. But dogs were different. No free will. Easily misled. It raised an ethical problem. Shooting a dog because it had been induced to do something unwise was not the sort of thing Reacher wanted to do.

All things bend to help the man Who seeks to harmonize His own free will with nature's plan, And prove himself most wise.

In historical events great men-so called-are but the labels that serve to give a mane to an event, and like labels, they have the last possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

There is no God, there is only what you want.

Reality is on a delay. For you, nothing is now. Realizing this fact is unsettling. If we can only react to the past, how do we manage to navigate the present? It's easy to spiral into a treatise on free will while in the fetal position, overthinking our forever past.

We are spirit children of a loving Heavenly Father who placed us in mortality to see if we would choose - freely choose - to keep His commandments and come unto His Beloved Son. They do not compel us. They cannot, for that would interfere with the plan of happiness. And so there is in us a God-given desire to be responsible for our own choices.

Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals.

He that will maintain that man's free will is able to do or work anything in spiritual cases, be they never so small, denies Christ.

you can use positive constraints to increase perceived free will and results. Freeform days might seem idyllic, but they are paralyzing due to continual paradox of choice (e.g., "What should I do now?") and decision fatigue (e.g., "What should I have for breakfast?"). In

Here we find a parallel to Luther's disdain of reason. In its legitimate sphere reason is the highest gift of God, but the moment it transgresses into theology it becomes the "Devil's Whore." So, too, with free will. Understood as the God-given capacity to make ordinary decisions, to carry out one's responsibilities in the world, free will remains intact. What it cannot do is effect its own salvation.

Tutte le decisioni che prendi, tutte le scelte che fai sono determinate, tu credi, dal tuo libero arbitrio, ma anche questa e' una balla. Sono determinate da qualcosa dentro di te che innanzitutto e' il tuo istinto, e poi forse da qualcosa che i tuoi amici indiani chiamano il karma e con cui spiegano tutto, anche cio' che a noi e' inspiegabile.

What psychology failed to appreciate, Frankl believed, is the multidimensional nature of human beings. He did not deny that biology or conditioning shapes us, but he also insisted that there is room for free will—to choose to develop certain values or a particular course in life, or to retain our dignity in difficult situations.

Any apparent insurrection in the human body or mind against Emperor Soul, manifesting as disease or irrationality, is due to no disloyalty among the humble subjects, but stems from past or present misuse by man of his individuality or free will—given to him simultaneously with a soul, and revocable never. Identifying

A man of realisation does not perform any miracle until he receives an inward sanction," Master explained. "God does not wish the secrets of His creation revealed promiscuously. Also, every individual in the world has inalienable rights to his free will. A saint will not encroach upon that independence.