Top 100 Willful Quotes
#1. In my head, I was getting 'gangsta,' which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting 'gangster' in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation.
Mat Johnson
#2. Once, maybe I would have thought you a fool, but ... well, that's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren't going to hurt you.
Brandon Sanderson
#3. We are like water, aren't we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too. And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.
Wally Lamb
#4. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin
#5. The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
M. Scott Peck
#6. There is a lot of willful irresponsibility in electrical utility companies.
Steven Magee
#7. If there is one thing I will not abide it is the folly of a willful pride.
Patrick Rothfuss
#8. It disturbs me mostly ... is the willful, deliberate denial (by the FDA, of) our own citizens, a fair chance to use Laetrile, when all the record (shows) it is not toxic, ... is safe, ... and is effective.
Luther L. Bohanon
#10. Historians will remember the first year of Microsoft Windows 10 for its willful vandalism of many computers through the release of a flawed operating system (OS) and mandatory flaky automatic updates.
Steven Magee
#12. If it's a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.
Paul Murray
#13. Ah, to be a conservative climate change denier. While real scientists must do all the research and engage in heated debates about just how bad things are going to be, the deniers can rest easy in the bliss of willful ignorance.
David Horsey
#14. Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
#15. Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.
Al Gore
#16. I was convicted of three misdemeanors of willful failure to file a form.
Wesley Snipes
#17. The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.
Aleister Crowley
#18. Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?
John Green
#19. Man is a creature of a willful head, And hardly driven is, but eas'ly led.
Samuel Daniel
#20. If there is a nuclear tactic being used here, I submit it is the use of that obstruction where a willful minority blocks a bipartisan majority from voting on the President's judicial nominees.
John Cornyn
#21. Keep Your servant from willful sins; do not let them rule over me. Then I will be innocent, and cleansed from blatant rebellion. Psalm 19:13
Beth Moore
#22. Willful ignorance or resistance to alleged facts has been a big ingredient in any success I've had.
Rob Delaney
#23. It never pleases me to punish willful disobedience, Isabel. Having to punish you for that sort of thing means I've failed to communicate what it is I expect out of you. It means I'm failing you as a Dom if you don't understand what my wants and needs are, and I hate failing at anything.
Ella Dominguez
#24. What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.
Jared Diamond
#26. But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more.
David Bentley Hart
#27. Because I do not wish to know," he says. "I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.
Erin Morgenstern
#28. I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and - if you're not careful - those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.
Brandon Sanderson
#30. For love is a willful stirring of our thoughts unto God, so that it receive nothing that is against the love of Jesus Christ, and therewith that it be lasting in sweetness of devotion; and that is the perfection of this life.
Richard Rolle
#31. Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
D. A. Carson
#32. Rebels depend on willful gullibility.
Dan Jones
#33. Bill O'Reilly calls his tv show the "No Spin Zone" but the man is practically a whirling dervish. He combines willful ignorance with a simple child-like faith in the system that, not coincidentally, has made him a millionaire.
Earl Lee
#34. In these pages, traveling "solo" does not necessarily mean "alone." The absence of other people often suggests regretful isolation. "Solo" by contrast, is a willful decision to be the architect of our own experience.
Gina Greenlee
#35. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her ... her eyes were her own.
Margaret Mitchell
#36. Of all the named structures within the abdomen and the chest, those associated with reproduction retained the mysteries of their willful behavior long after others had been solved to the satisfaction of physicians and philosophers.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#37. The frantic stupidity of Wall Street's stock order routers and algorithms was simply an extension into the computer of the willful ignorance of its salespeople.
Michael Lewis
#38. The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead.
James S.A. Corey
#39. Love is a cognitive, willful act. Feelings have very little to do with it, particularly around three o'clock in the morning when the baby needs changing or somebody has "lost it" before getting to the bathroom to throw up.
Kevin Leman
#40. Political correctness is a poison to our security and defenses. It imposes a willful blindness, both at the macro level when unwilling to engage with radical Islamism or whatever you want to call it - if you're not willing to call it what it is - and at the micro level, at the street level.
Pete Hegseth
#42. There is a dedication to willful incompetence in many corporate government departments.
Steven Magee
#43. We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Benjamin Franklin
#44. That's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion.
Brandon Sanderson
#45. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The
Lev Grossman
#46. There is a dangerous willful ignorance in governments to the adverse health effects of the various forms of electromagnetic radiation.
Steven Magee
#47. And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?
James Joyce
#48. Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable.
Robert McKee
#49. Bronson always said that, of all the girls, Louisa was most like her mother, and he didn't mean it as a compliment. Both were mercurial, passionate, willful. Louisa had seen despair like Abba's from the inside. She had inherited it the way some daughters came into a silver tray or a set of spoons.
Kelly O'Connor McNees
#50. Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination.
Valerie Martin
#51. To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.
Carl Jung
#52. There are a sort of men, whose visages
Do cream and mantle, like a standing pond;
And do a willful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity profound conceit;
As who should say, I am sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!
William Shakespeare
#53. There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work."
James Ellroy
#54. We know what willpower is, but by some misguided conception, many of us believe we have to be a certain type of person, strong, determined, extroverted, to be able to be willful, to exercise willpower. Not so. We all have it and just don't know how to use it.
Rosemary Altea
#55. It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter
an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#57. Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed.
Anne Rice
#58. It has been my experience that law enforcement reports are littered with fabrications, inaccuracies, omissions, fraud, fantasies and willful blindness.
Steven Magee
#59. Freedom is never easy to keep and can easily be lost. All it takes is willful indifference.
Terry Goodkind
#60. Where resides the comforting knowledge of history's vast, cyclical sweep, the ebb and flow of wars and peace? Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of willful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls.
Steven Erikson
#61. Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.
Vivienne Westwood
#62. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins
#64. When and if Violet ever fell in love, lightning would split the heavens, tectonic plates would shift, continents would reorder themselves.
Because she might be willful and spoiled and impetuous, but no one loved with the force of his sister. Her love story would be epic.
Julie Anne Long
#65. [The] idealization of marriage is typical of those who are excluded from it: priests, gays, adolescents. It shows an extraordinary willful blindness.
Michael Warner
#66. I'd have felt better with Morgen to talk to, to help, but all I had was memory and a soulsong to help me with our ancient cousins from across the stars, cousins so willful they could not see. Cousins even more willful than the ancient heroes my mother had bequeathed to me.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#67. Sin is the willful transgression of divine law. The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the gift of God to His children to correct and overcome the consequences of sin. The gift of the Atonement of Jesus Christ provides us at all times and at all places with the blessings of repentance and forgiveness.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#68. At the heart of the human condition, we might say, is an epistemological sin - the refusal to acknowledge what can be known about God and then to respond appropriately: "Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him" (Rom. 1:21). They engage in willful blindness.
Nancy Pearcey
#69. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.
Tim Wise
#70. Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become willful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood - it acquires all the qualities of common superstition - and
Eleanor Catton
#71. The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.
Nikola Tesla
#72. More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
Richard Dawkins
#73. Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.
Hannah Arendt
#74. A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.
Woodrow Wilson
#75. There was a willful calm and happiness. I think people can decide to be happy. Maybe that was it.
Robert Reeves
#76. The destructive power of pride is that it countenances nothing higher than itself. Because of an inherent fault in our nature, man's bias is on the side of error. In our willful desire to live independently of God, we have severed the lifeline that flows from the source of all life.
Billy Graham
#77. One tended to lose one's bearings in the presence of willful and persistent acts of craziness, and the more gentle the act, the crazier it seemed, as if rage and violence, being closer to the norm, were easier to accommodate.
Tom Robbins
#78. Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.
Thomas A. Edison
#79. Willful ignorance is something to be ashamed of, not proud.
Christina Engela
#80. Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.
John Steinbeck
#81. Patience perforce with willful choler meeting/Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting./I will withdraw, but this intrusion shall,/Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt'rest gall.
William Shakespeare
#82. Consider the willful scorching of the earth, over-fishing, wasteful hunting, excessive and dangerous recycling of resources, and other similar "injustices" against the ways of nature share in the responsibility for this ecological spiraling down.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I Of Constantinople
#83. Knowledge tossed away," she said, shivering a little in the desert chill. "Willful ignorance in the face of something we might have to work to understand." At
Richard K. Morgan
#84. Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.
Holly Lisle
#85. [T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz
#86. I think that the root of Willful Ignorance, is Fear. We'll return to that in a minute. But the root of Fear, is Simple Ignorance, at least I think that our original Fear is rooted in simply not understanding the World around us: not knowing.
Steve Bivans
#87. No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.
Max Black
#89. Angry people may appear strong, willful, or certain, but be assured that beneath the veneer are fear and loneliness and insecurity and pain. Especially, there is pain.
Les Carter
#90. I'm extremely willful to win, and I respond to challenges. Scoring titles and stuff like that ... it sounds, well, I don't care how it sounds - to me, scoring comes easy. It's not a challenge to me to win the scoring title, because I know I can.
Kobe Bryant
#91. We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
Plato
#92. Of all mankind's unpleasant habits, sheer and willful cruelty is the most base, the least forgivable and, when carried to its extreme, perhaps the most horrific.
Christopher Riche Evans
#93. Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#94. SELF
BENEATH THE SURFACE,
VEILED ON PURPOSE,
ALL KNOWING AND GRAND,
DIRECTED, GUIDED, BY THE ETERNAL HAND,
SUSTAINED, FULFILLED, FULL OF LIGHT,
REALIZATION ACHIEVED, BY WILLFUL MIGHT.
Charles Edward
#95. Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
Benjamin Franklin
#96. Red Riding Hood screamed, not out of alarm at the wolf's apparent tendency toward cross-dressing, but because of his willful invasion of her personal space.
James Finn Garner
#97. Whatever's merely willful, and not miraculous (be never it so skilful) must wither fail and cease - but better than to grow beauty knows no.
E. E. Cummings
#98. An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
James A. Michener
#99. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Isaac Asimov
#100. You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.
Tibor Fischer
