Top 100 Quotes About Free Will
#1. Argument against free will defence: There are some who, while no less free than others, would never knowingly harm another person, and it is surely conceivable that everyone should have been like that.
Unknown
#2. That the stars guide us, but do not compel us. It is our free will that determines the outcome of all things. God does impose his will on us, rather he makes it known and allows us to choose if we will follow it.
Kathleen McGowan
#3. One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.
P. J. O'Rourke
#4. I once laboured hard for the free will of man, until the grace of God at length overcame me.
Saint Augustine
#5. The essence of spiritual life is simply to use our free will properly.
Radhanath Swami
#6. I triumph and rejoice that my action should have obtained your approval; nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that those whom I have sent off alive and free will again bear arms against me; for there is nothing which I so much covet as that I should be like myself, and they like themselves.
Vikram Seth
#7. Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, ... [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general ... It is rare for a human being to have free will ... (140)
Ravi Ravindra
#8. The illusion of free will, of freedom, is a useful tool you know. Let people think they are free and present them with a danger to their so-called freedom, a fear. It's amazing how much you can get them to deal with just as long as you tell them they're still free.
Jordon Greene
#9. I may need your permission to keep you, girl. But I don't need anyone's permission to love you. I choose it of my own free will, and there's nothing you can do about it.-Finn.
Kersten Hamilton
#10. God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices
exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.
Jim Butcher
#11. The greatest gift God gave us is also our greatest curse, which is the free will. We are made in God's image, the Bible says, which means we have the ability to love him or not love him, to reject him or not reject him.
Rick Warren
#12. We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will.
John Brockman
#13. And what if I never go of my own free will? Will you pitch me from some window
so that I must fly or fall? Will you bolt all shutters after me? You had better, because
I'll knock and knock and knock until I fall down dead. I'll have no wings that take me
away from you.
Anne Rice
#14. All I asked was that I be spared surprises, although, in this world of six billion souls, all acting with free will and too many with audacity, surprises are inevitable, too few of them are the kind that make you smile and that lift your heart.
Dean Koontz
#15. God is alive now and in control of everything that happens. There is no free will, only one almighty will that is infinitely powerful.
Steven Colborne
#16. Free Will : "I made you think so."
Predestination: "I knew you had to.
Toba Beta
#17. There are no mistakes or accidents. The present is malleable. Influence the odds. Free will is your pen, write your life.
Pharrell Williams
#18. The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law, distinct from "a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system" (United States v. Grayson, 1978).
Sam Harris
#19. Free will and choice implies that you are able to even re-write your record of memories.
Lionel Suggs
#20. I've had my share, less than so many though, but enough to feel empathy. It's tough and I see it so much on Earth, too much suffering. The loss of free will I find unacceptable - what most of us refer to as rights.
Kristin Bauer Van Straten
#21. Yet what kind of choice is free when to choose one thing over the other brings condemnation? How is "free will" free when it is not your will, but someone else's, which must be done?
Neale Donald Walsch
#22. I think there's great potential for autonomy, but we have to remember that we live in a world where people may have free will but have not invented their circumstances.
Thomas Frank
#23. God did not force Salvation on humanity; He made it a gift dependent on the free will of the recipient because He is not interested in numbers. Mega Churches are numbers. Matthew 7:13-14.
Felix Wantang
#24. This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
Neal Stephenson
#25. 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.
John Calvin
#26. I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.
Patricia Churchland
#27. You've followed Malexia for years. You have done terrible things. So, if as you say, you have a will of your own, did you do those things because you were ordered, or did you do them of your own free will?
T.T. Escurel
#28. 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.
William James
#29. we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact,
we may not be choosing anything.
It could be that anything's decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices.
Free will may be an illusion
Haruki Murakami
#30. There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I must concede you the Devil. God doesn't really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We're so busy punishing ourselves.
Agatha Christie
#31. We assume that we have free will and that we make decisions, but we don't. Neurons do. We decide that this sum total driving us is a decision we have made for ourselves. But it is not.
Rodolfo Llinas
#32. Free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Flannery O'Connor
#33. Love given without free will or truthfulness wasn't love at all.
Cassandra Clare
#34. The professional, though he accepts money, does his work out of love. He has to love it. Otherwise he wouldn't devote his life to it of his own free will.
Steven Pressfield
#35. He demonstrated that there was no such thing as free will, since men's creative impulses were determined, as all else, by the economic structure of the epoch in which they lived.
Ayn Rand
#36. I believe that modern science supports free will, in showing that the brain can act spontaneously, not only in response to external stimuli.
Mario Bunge
#37. You realize that there is no free will in what we create with AI. Everything functions within rules and
parameters
Clyde DeSouza
#38. Free will does not enable any man to perform good works, unless he is assisted by grace; indeed, the special grace which the elect alone receive through regeneration. For I stay not to consider the extravagance of those who say that grace is offered equally and promiscuously to all
John Calvin
#39. There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of "sin" and "free will" and "moral responsibility.
Raymond Smullyan
#40. There are those who would say true predators are animals that don't have free will. I say everything's a choice. All creatures can choose to live or die, eat or starve, love or hate according to their will.
April White
#41. Regret' implies a freely chosen, but erroneous, action; free will plays no part in my story.
David Mitchell
#42. It is not about whether you have free will, rather it is about whether you have enough experience to make the best possible wilful decision in the current moment of life.
Abhijit Naskar
#43. Man forges his own history, imposing on nature the errors of his free will. If hatred and greed drag man down among bloody mazes, the struggle is joined between perverted freedoms and just freedoms.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#44. Stubbornness is knowing exactly what you want courageously living by free will; never to be judged or ridiculed.
Michelle Cruz-Rosado
#45. I am passionate about the things that I believe in like equality, free will, justice and love.
Trish Kaye Lleone
#46. Courage is living by the free will that one creates for themselves, not the life of monotony determined by another.
Michelle Cruz-Rosado
#48. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not
destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture
his inner mind, we reshape him.
George Orwell
#49. Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.
Sam Harris
#50. It is He who gave to this intellectual nature free-will of such a kind, that if he wishes to forsake God his blessedness, misery should forthwith result.
Saint Augustine
#51. Life was what you determined it to be; regardless of where fate put you, logic and free will meant you could make your cabbage patch anything the fuck you wanted.
J.R. Ward
#52. There was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it.
Daryl Gregory
#53. You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.
Hillary Jordan
#54. Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive favour in the long term.
Caitlin Moran
#55. For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#56. In discourse more sweet; For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense. Others apart sat on a hill retir'd, In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fix'd fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute; And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.
John Milton
#57. God allows each and everyone to exercise their free will and free choice -- for their own betterment or to their own detriment.
Douglas James Cottrell
#58. Remembering a dream is almost as hard as catching a bird in your hand, but sometimes it's as if the bird comes and sits on your shoulder of its own free will.
Jostein Gaarder
#59. I do not believe any power can possess the mind of a man or woman ... I believe in God-given free will, you see. I think nothing is forced on us, except by other people like ourselves. I think our choices are our own.
Susan Cooper
#60. She was the sort of woman who could suck out free will and self esteem with a look.
Tyne O'Connell
#61. I suppose we're built with complete free will, and as much as we're capable of depravity, to the same degree we are wired for greatness. Everyone gets to choose, I think. And my challenge is to decide where I'll place the bulk of my attention. What I'll most believe in.
Catherine Ryan Hyde
#62. Oh, that God would have made His will ours! Giving us free will was not free; there were costs to consider and balance. The reward for our choices, for our belief in ourselves and our desire to do the right thing, were great. But along the way we had to take risks. We had to try.
Nancy Moser
#63. It struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next.
James Gleick
#64. For if "Free-will" cannot of itself will good, but wills good by grace alone, (for we are speaking of "Free-will" apart from grace and inquiring into the power which properly belongs to each) who does not see, that that good will, merit, and reward, belong to grace alone.
Martin Luther
#65. It was a planet full of tests and meta-tests. I suppose they loved tests so much because they believed in free will.
Matt Haig
#66. You know what's wrong with humanity? ... The greatest gift we were given is our free will, and we keep misusing it.
Dean Koontz
#67. I've always believed free will is a birthright. God even allows us to choose whether to be led by the divine order
Oprah Winfrey
#68. Don't dwell on what may be. Apply yourself to the task at hand. The Hags of Fate may predict the future, but there is always free will, and that is your saving grace, my dear.
Yasmine Galenorn
#69. On the chessboard of his godforsaken existence, the pieces were lined up, the play preordained. Man, so many times in life you didn't get to pick your path because the way you went was decided for you.
Free will was such bullshit.
-Vishous's thoughts
J.R. Ward
#70. Nothing a woman gives is worth having unless she gives it of her own free will.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#71. we have that the animal does not: reason and free will, or free choice.
Peter Kreeft
#72. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?
Dalai Lama
#73. The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.
C.S. Lewis
#74. Free-will doesn't include shit-happens,
unless that's the goal of one's intention.
Toba Beta
#75. Free will, huh? Damn. It is a bitch.' And then he smiled-he smiled-at me, a real smile, revealing those deep dimples. 'I lost myself the moment I found you.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#76. What makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.
BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
Chapter 27 Page 214
Dean Koontz
#77. The free-will of men and the sovereignty of God are operationally co-existent, neither Reality impunes the 'co-dependent' authority of the other.
R. Alan Woods [2012]
R. Alan Woods
#78. I don't believe everything "is meant to be." I believe God wants to direct our steps, but our free will makes for a lot of detours.
Kirstin Leigh
#79. 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.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
#80. Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the free will to select his course.
Clarence Darrow
#81. He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will ... if there ever had been such a thing.
Stephen King
#82. Free grace will fix those, whom free will shook down into a gulph of misery.
Thomas Boston
#83. Catholic theology believes that God gave man free will, and you can't give somebody free will and then send in a play from the sidelines.
Roger Ebert
#84. Genetics play a huge part in who we are. But we also have free will.
Aidan Quinn
#85. This error of free will is a special doctrine of the Antichrist.
Martin Luther
#86. Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.
Ayn Rand
#87. I've had so many great experiences in my life, of living total free will, that I wouldn't change it for all the gold in the earth.
George Jung
#88. How could predetermination and free will both exist? "It's
Hillary Jordan
#89. Free will isn't always about choice; often weakness plays the game
Jeyn Roberts
#90. Everyone's had shit in their lives. Some people have it worse than others. But no one can turn you into a bad person, just like no one can turn you into a good one. We're all dealt our hands in life, and how we choose to react is entirely up to us. That's free will.
Kelley York
#91. To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.
Dean Koontz
#92. [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.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
#93. Call it no more free-will, but slavish lust; free to evil, but free from good, till regenerating grace loosens the bands of wickedness.
Thomas Boston
#94. The neutral view of free will is impossible. It involves choice without desire.
R.C. Sproul
#95. Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#96. In this life, y'ever notice that you face the same challenges again and again? We all do. They're challenges to your soul. We repeat them until we face them and master them. Yes we all have free will, but there're divine patterns out there, and the battle is to see them.
Brad Meltzer
#98. The difficulty in dealing with a maze or labyrinth lies not so much in navigating the convolutions to find the exit but in not entering the damn thing in the first place.
Or, at least not yet again.
As a creature of free will, do not be tempted into futility.
Vera Nazarian
#99. The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance.
Margaret Atwood
#100. If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us.
Madeleine L'Engle
