Quotes About Man's Free Will

#1. A man's free will cannot cure him even of the toothache, or a sore finger; and yet he madly thinks it is in its power to cure his soul.

Augustus Toplady

#2. We reject the teaching that the work of the Holy Spirit in regeneration is dependent upon the exercise of man's free will.

Anonymous

#3. Those who speak of man's "free will," and insist upon his inherent power to either accept or reject the Saviour, do but voice their ignorance of the real condition of Adam's fallen children.

Arthur W. Pink

#4. Man is nothing; he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him" and "you dishonour God by denying election. You plainly make salvation depend, not on God's 'free grace' but on Man's 'free will.'

George Whitefield

#5. Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#6. God allows man to learn His supernatural ends, but the decision to strive towards an end, the choice of course, is left to man's free will. God does not redeem man against his will.

Pope John Paul II

#7. They go and set up free-will with the heathen philosophers and say that a man's free will is the cause why God chooseth and not another, contrary to all scriptures.

William Tyndale

#8. Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

Ayn Rand

#9. 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.

Martin Luther

#10. If a man's free will to adopt ideas and values is inalienable, his freedom of action - his freedom to put these ideas into effect in the world - is not in such a fortunate condition.

Murray Rothbard

#11. We teach that all men are naturally depraved. We condemn man's free will, his strength, wisdom, and righteousness. We say that we obtain grace by the free mercy of God alone for Christ's sake.

Martin Luther

#12. And so it is to the printing press
to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news
that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

John F. Kennedy

#13. Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.

Laurence J. Peter

#14. It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word! ... We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! ... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#15. She talked about God giving man free will. Because of that, there is evil in the world. If God pulled everyone's strings all the time, we'd be puppets.

Janice Cantore

#16. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.

Malcolm X

#17. Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

Mark Twain

#18. I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.

Hermann Hesse

#19. I do feel free, I have patched things up with my ex-husband to the degree of this real friendship. We spend a lot of time together as a family with our son, no way will we be man and wife again.

Beccy Cole

#20. The death of the MG marks the end of one of the most perfect products of free enterprise, born out of the voracious will to succeed of one man and the burgeoning market for middle-class status symbols. The car first appeared as a souped-up Morris Oxford in 1923 when it won the Land's End Rally.

Nick Davies

#21. Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

Will Durant

#22. Above these universal themes 'Truth Will Set U Free' is also a song composed for those who were born gay. I am a straight man so I do not profess to understand or know what a LGBT person experiences but I do recognize injustice when I see it.

Corey Hart

#23. Man has free will and creates his destiny based upon his actions.

Ashwin Sanghi

#24. Shed, as you do your garments, your daily sins, whether of omission or commission, and you will wake a free man, with a new life.

William Osler

#25. I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew.

Albert Einstein

#26. Not by prayers alone will a captive be freed, but by another man's prayers matched by his deeds.

John Kramer

#27. You [Mankind] have been given no particular function. You may give your life whatever form you choose, do whatever you wish ... you have no limitations, and can act in accord with your own free will. You alone can choose the limits of your nature.

Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

#28. A wise man sees the path all must walk and embraces the free will of humankind, even if to watch it unfold causes him pain.

Colleen Houck

#29. A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#30. Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. If we understand our first and sole duty to consist of loving God supremely and loving everyone, even our enemies, for God's dear sake, then we can enjoy spiritual tranquility under every circumstance.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#31. Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#32. It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man's religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion, to which free will and not force should lead us.

Tertullian

#33. Although we are urged to walk in another man's shoes, I think, first, we have to walk in another pair of our own shoes. Doing that will free up a lot, including our ability to be more compassionate and less judgmental.

Charles F. Glassman

#34. Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master. These are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country, and on that freedom all of our other freedoms depend.

Margaret Thatcher

#35. Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

Max Stirner

#36. Do not believe that others will die, not you ... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Mary Renault

#37. The bending of men's hearts to believe and persevere are the supernatural fruits of God's eternal decree, and not the natural fruits of man's depraved and frail free will.

William Jenkyn

#38. The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God's will and refusing to do it.

Arnold J. Toynbee

#39. There is no sin unless through a man's own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own will.
(Against Fortunatus)

Augustine Of Hippo

#40. Man is now a horror to God and himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will.

C.S. Lewis

#41. Man's responsibility is correspondingly operative with his free agency. Actions in harmony with divine law and the laws of nature will bring happiness, and those in opposition to divine truth, misery. Man is responsible not only for every deed, but also for every idle word and thought.

David O. McKay

#42. Beware of her fair hair, for she excels
All women in the magic of her locks;
And when she winds them round a young man's neck,
She will not ever set him free again.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#43. God's work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man's will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

#44. Black people in America will never be free so long as they're on the white man's land ... We can't be free until we get our own land and our own country in North America. When we separate from America and take maybe ten states, then we'll be free.

Muhammad Ali

#45. (4) But only man knows consciously and rationally, and only man's loves can be conscious and rational and responsible through free will.

Peter Kreeft

#46. My daddy never really lived before he died, He could never count on justice or know a free man's pride, And now it's almost certain that I, too, will be denied, I've got to make things better for my son and for my tribe

Bob Teague

#47. Public awareness is the equinox of tyranny's rise; once one man learns of another's captivity, he will act to free him. It is the best and most certain part of man's nature.

John Kramer

#48. This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's laws?

Max Planck

#49. Kidnap me and take me away. Throw me across the back of your bike and show me what it feels like to have the wind in your face and the sun on your skin, day in and day out. If it's anything at all like this then it must be heaven on earth.

C.M. Stunich

#50. 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

#51. A man renowned for repartee will seldom scruple to make free with friendship's finest feeling, will thrust a dagger at your breast, and say he wounded you in jest, by way of balm for healing.

William Cowper

#52. 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

#53. God's greatest gift to man
In all the bounty He was moved to make
Throughout creation-the one gift the most
Close to his goodness and the one He calls
Most precious-is free will.

Dante Alighieri

#54. Man's will is free to follow his inclinations, but fallen man's inclinations are always and invariably away from God.

R.C. Sproul

#55. There's an alternate view. That no man or woman alive is the disempowered victim of another's degrading circumstance. Each is equipped to pursue their own fate. No one needs saving.

Janny Wurts

#56. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours - and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please.

Ayn Rand

#57. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.

Mahatma Gandhi

#58. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacrilizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.

Mircea Eliade

#59. You will not make a man wiser by taking freedom of action from him. A man can only learn when he is free to act.

Auberon Herbert

#60. Woman cannot be free until man's mind is liberated from the megalomania! His self-exaltation is the mother of the gender inequalities. Till we eliminate his exacerbated narcissism, woman will remain unfree!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#61. No just man suffices unto himself for the winning of justification. The divine mercy must always hold out a hand to his footsteps as they falter and almost stumble, and this is so because the weakness of his free will may cause him to lose balance, and if he falls he may perish forever.

John Cassian

#62. Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.
Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#63. A hymn for freedom;
without border barriers and barbed wire fences.
A hymn for freedom;
without astute words.
A hymn for freedom;
without wars of every man against every man.
A hymn to freedom;
at any time and any place,
because only freedom will set us free.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

#64. A man who is willing to accept restriction and barriers and is not afraid of them is free. A man who does nothing but fight restrictions and barriers will usually be trapped.

L. Ron Hubbard

#65. Any time you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something that you have to do for yourselves.

Malcolm X

#66. The concept of Free Will makes no sense unless associated, somehow or the other, with Absolute Determinism; it is just as a man cannot walk without gravity arresting and spurring his pace simultaneously.

Raheel Farooq

#67. I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.

Ellen Glasgow

#68. There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

Agatha Christie

#69. The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#70. If we go to the white man for school ,we will learn the way the white man wants us to learn. We will come back and build the country the white man wants us to build. One that continues to serve them. We will never be free.

Yaa Gyasi

#71. The heart of man will never find true peace, if it does not empty itself of all that is not God, so as to free itself all free for His love, that He alone may possess the whole of it. But this the soul cannot do of itself; it must obtain it of God by repeated prayers.

Alfonso Maria De Liguori

#72. I (God) will leave man to make the fateful guess, Will leave him torn between the no and yes, Leave him unresting till he rests in me, Drawn upward by the choice that makes him free, Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose, With all in life to win or all to lose.

Edwin Markham

#73. My legal wife is to me dead; the only ecclesiastical authority I recognise pronounces me free; the attacks and threats of men do not disturb me. I am acting according to a clear conscience, and am doing hurt to no man. For my conduct, I will answer to my maker.

William The Silent

#74. But destiny will be accomplished, and the best man will hold his ground while the undeserving one will vanish into his back-alley for ever - his filthy back-alley, his beloved back-alley, where he is at home and where he will sink in filth and stench at his own free will with enjoyment.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#75. Chosen to hold; and therefore they are of our own ordering; and therefore there is perfect justice in the universe. No suffering for another man's original sin, but the reaping of a harvest that we ourselves have sown. We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thought.

Emmet Fox

#76. Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support the State. Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave and independent man - the man of stainless integrity, of will and intellectual force.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#77. When a man accepts that he will no doubt die, he is free to live.

M. Glenn Taylor

#78. Ye [Anabaptists] be proud contemners of the free grace of God offered to man in Christ Jesus. For with the Pelagians and Papists ye are become teachers of free will, and defenders of your own righteousness

John Knox

#79. Isn't Love the great facilitator of the Universe's creation according to the free will of man's mind which, if facilitated by a selfish being generates a hell, and by a loving being, a paradise?

Ivan Figueroa-Otero

#80. And we shall see for the first time since man lifted the club to strike down his brother, the world that woman would make and what woman have to teach men, and only when men can be taught will they be allowed to run free among woman again

Anne Rice

#81. Man's will is free in the sense that man can choose to do anything in keeping with his nature ... Man's will is not free in that he is limited to his nature

Henry Clarence Thiessen

#82. Every man's reason is his own rightful umpire. This principle, with that of acquiescence in the will of the majority, will preserve us free and prosperous as long as they are sacredly observed.

Thomas Jefferson

#83. Man will be free only when he frees both himself and all other creatures!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#84. A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley

#85. A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic.

George MacDonald

#86. No," I said. "There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I might concede you the Devil. God doesn't really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We're so very busy punishing ourselves.

Agatha Christie

#87. A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#88. We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man. In this great struggle, this form of Government and every form of human right is endangered if our enemies succeed.

Abraham Lincoln

#89. God wills in man only that which is good, in the kingdom of his grace; where the free will yields itself up into the grace, there God wills that which is good in the will, through the grace.

Jakob Bohme

#90. Christianity tells us we have free will. God has provided man with a choice whether to believe in Him or not. If God's existence were logically inescapable, there would be no free will to choose whether or not to believe in Him.

Stephen McAndrew

#91. [The Christmas story] is as simple as was the Man himself and His teaching. SA simple as the Sermon on the Mount which still remains as the ultimate basis ... of the belief of free men of good will everywhere.

Hal Borland

#92. Life is a great university for the unfolding of the mind, for developing character. In choosing our life work, when we are free to choose, we should remember this, and choose that which will call the biggest man or woman out of us and not that from which we can coin the most dollars.

Orison Swett Marden

#93. The man who can keep order can rule the world, but the man who can bear disorder is truly free.

Gillian Cross

#94. The important thing to realize is that while we may not escape our own basic pattern, we can work in harmony with it. That is where free will comes in. Once having chosen, a man has to accept the consequences of his choice, and go on from there.

Swami Yogananda

#95. In discussing the subject of free will, the question is not, whether external obstacles will permit a man to execute what he has internally resolved, but whether, in any matter whatever, he has a free power of judging and of willing.

John Calvin

#96. America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.

Woodrow Wilson

#97. The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour" that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies : serious reflection, the profound self conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#98. The will of man without the grace of God is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil since it cannot turn itself to good.

Martin Luther

#99. It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.

Wernher Von Braun

#100. Poor man! You have many burdens on you: The burdens of your religion, of your culture, of your ignorance, of your oppressive government! Find a wild horse and watch it! You will see what is to be unburdened and free!

Mehmet Murat Ildan