Quotes About Free will

Não se deve entender como pirata uma pessoa agindo sob constrangimento, mas sim alguém que age livremente. Pois nesse caso, não é o ato em si mesmo que torna alguém culpado, mas sim a sua livre vontade de cometê-lo.

In order not to annul our free will, I judge it true that Fortune may be mistress of one half our actions but then even she leaves the other half, or almost, under our control.

The only hope I have left for you hangs on a great doubt - the doubt whether we are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is before death.

Spinoza compares the feeling of free will to a stone's thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall.

Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.

I will assume for the present---until next year---that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

Speechwriters are fundamentally Calvinist: They become nervous if their principals exhibit free will and depart from the prepared text.

They were moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.

The presence of the problem of man's free will, though unexpressed, is felt at every step of history. All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of a solution of that question. If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.

You're saying the gods don't have free will." "The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals.

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

I took two or three months and I came up with a reason that I thought was enough and I went with it: if there is a God he's definitely not benevolent. We should mean less to him than ants. And if there is a God or there are gods they would value, more than anything, free will.

You are not mine to command. But the choice to kill always means closing the mind to the chance of a living alternative.

Every free action has two causes which concur in producing it, one moral, namely the will which determines it, the other physical, namely the power which executes it.

People are like dice, you throw yourself in the direction of your own choosing....

He was free, free for everything, free to act like an animal or like a machine.

i realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new.

People are like dice. We throw ourselves in the direction of our own choosing.

Man is free rather than man is freedom.

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

Free will is the cutting edge of Creation, don't you see? The word spontaneity derives from the Latin sponte, meaning 'of one's free will.' Spontaneity is the impulse, the purest expression of freedom, and the impulse wants to do whatever it wants to do. But you are afraid of what others think, others who are just as afraid of what you think, and so you pussyfoot along the perimeter of the free-will zone, wilting like a wallflower.

I don't mean to attack you, child," Mr. Benedict said gently. "Let us strike a bargain. If you join the team, this shall be our understanding: You will follow my instructions, but only because you have agreed to do so, not because I told you to. No one is making you do anything. It is all of your own free will." "Fine," said Constance at last.