Quotes About Will

No god craves weaklings.

Depression, for me, has been a couple of different things – but the first time I felt it, I felt helpless, hopeless, and things I had never felt before. I lost myself and my will to live.

Our dear Lord said we should pray always. Everything we are doing should be either a prayer in itself or can be made into a prayer. Any action that is not in itself wrong can be done in union with God and His divine will.

In Zen we study the will. We learn how to cultivate it, to accumulate will. We use it to direct our actions, and we don't overuse it or abuse it - that's a waste.

You don't realize what fine fighting material there is in age. ... You show me any one who's lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter - some one who's got the will to live.

The will of the nation is one of those phrases most widely abused by schemers and tyrants of all ages.

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.

I have never loved a woman, and by God's grace, I never will.

On the other hand, for the whole human being who wills, feels, and represents, external reality is given simultaneously and with as much certitude as his own self.

Reproduction is the ultimate purpose of every organism, and its strongest instinct; for only so can the will conquer death. And to ensure this conquest of death, the will to reproduce is placed almost entirely beyond control of knowledge or reflection: even a philosopher, occasionally, has children.

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.

Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.

When I introspect I perceive not merely sensations and ideas but desire, will, ambition, and pride as vital phases of me. Spinoza was right: "desiderium ipsa essentia hominis"—desire is the very essence of man. We are living flames of desire until we admit final defeat. Will is desire expressed in ideas that become actions unless impeded by contrary or substitute desires and ideas. Character is the sum of our desires, fears, propensities, habits, abilities, and ideas.

Having first determined the question according to his will, man then resorts to experience; and bending her into conformity with his placets, leads her about like a captive in a procession.

What if the proper functioning of the intellect and philosophy is not the denial of the will (desire) but the coordination of desires into a united and harmonious will?

So philosophy purifies the will. But philosophy is to be understood as experience and thought, not as mere reading or passive study.

Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.

There can be no victory over the ills of life until the will has been utterly subordinated to knowledge and intelligence.

Genius consists in this, that the knowing faculty has received a considerably greater development than the service of the will demands.

Everyone who writes in the sub-genre of Victorian mystery stands in [Sir Arthur Conan] Doyle's shadow.

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

He who will not bend to Love must be subdu'd by Fear.

The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.

Voting represented no rational process, but was simply traditional in certain societies for obtaining consensus and expressing the will of a group. The vote expressed more about the committee or college than it did about the elected person.