Quotes About Free will

It's impossible to represent a saint [in Art]. It becomes boring. Perhaps because he is, like the Saturday Evening Post people, inthe position of having almost infinitely free will.

Omnis homo praeter Sortem currit, igitur Plato currit et sic de aliis a Sorte.

A world in which the choices we make do not finally matter, because our wills are already fixed beneath the weight of a crushing determinism, is not a human world.

But the arguments we had over free will and monads, while heated, were never as combatative as the ones we had over our marriage. I knew I was in trouble when, in one philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn't exist.

She taught me philosophy and I developed a crush on it. We read together and hired a student from Columbia to come in once a week and discuss a different great work. But the arguments we had over free will and monads, while heated, were never as combatative as the ones we had over our marriage. I knew I was in trouble when, in one philosophical discussion, Harlene proved I didn't exist. I

I like coincidences. They make me wonder about destiny, and whether free will is an illusion or just a matter of perspective. They let me speculate on the idea of some master plan that, from time to time, we're allowed to see out of the corner of our eye.

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.

A God possessed of free will is lesser than a God with a single law. In the same way that a concept is all the more true when it need not transform itself when faced with every individual case. God's perfection is proven more by the impossibility of miracles than the possibility.

It is regrettable," resumed Azédarac, "that any question of my holiness and devotional probity should have been raised among the clergy of Averoigne. But I suppose it was inevitable sooner or later— even though the chief difference between myself and many other ecclesiastics is, that I serve the Devil wittingly and of my own free will, while they do the same in sanctimonious blindness.

She'd come to understand that God was present for the good and the bad, and it wasn't that He was cruel, but that He knew—goodness was a choice. Rightness was a choice. Free will was the road to salvation, and God wasn't going to make you do the right thing. God's job was to be there if you chose Him, there if you didn't.

But now I wonder--what if everyone is pretty much the same and it's just a thousand small choices that add up to the person you are? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or angels whispering the right answers in our ears like it's some cosmic SAT test. Just us, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day, making the best choices we can. The thought is horrifying. If that's true, then there's no right choice. There's only choice.

But vows should never be to a crown. They should be to a ruler. And they should be of your own free will. I am your king, and beside me stands my queen. But it is your choice whether or not to follow us. Your will shall be your own.

Cecilia didn't care what the fine print said about free will and God's mysterious ways and blahdy-blah. If God had a supervisor, she would have sent off one of her famous letters of complaint a long time ago. "You have lost me as a customer.

Heart of my heart, you need no man to give you away. Just come to me of your own free will. Love me for who I am... just as I love you for who you are... and our bond will last until the stars lose their shining.

People would say my children should have free will to eat meat - my philosophy is that is wrong, not healthy for the planet, animals or people. They learned and embraced all they could, taking gradual steps toward becoming vegan.

free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

With attempts to find scientific support for free will failing badly, it is no surprise that the twentieth century saw the slow decline of free will as a scientifically tenable concept. In 1931, Einstein had declared it "man's illusion that he [is] acting according to his own free will.

In ancient times, determinism rested on a belief in an omniscient God. Today, it is not old-time religion but, rather, our culture's newfound faith—science—that challenges the belief in free will.

To assert a belief in free will is to accept responsibility for our actions and to recognize the mind as "more or less a first cause, an unmoved mover," as the theorist Thomas Clark says: it is to hold the view that "we could have willed otherwise in the radical sense that the will is not the explicable or predictable result of any set of conditions that held at the moment of choice.

F]ree will seems to violate all we know of how the world works, but as long as we cannot construct a logical proof of its nonexistence we cling to it tenaciously, even desperately.

M]aterialism clearly poses a bit of a problem for a central tenet of the justice system - namely, that people exert free will in their actions, including their criminal actions. If actions are merely the inevitable consequences of hard-wired brain circuitry - or, pushing the chain of causation back a step, of the genes we inherit from our parents - then the concept of genuine moral culpability becomes untenable.

Study after study has indeed found a primary role for the prefrontal cortex in freely performed volitional activity. "That aspect of free will which is concerned with the voluntary selection of one action rather than another critically depends upon the normal functioning of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and associated brain regions," Sean Spence and Chris Frith concluded in "The Volitional Brain.

T]he cascade of discoveries in neuroscience and genetics has created an image of individuals as automata, slaves to their genes or neurotransmitters, with no more free will than a child's windup toy.