Quotes on Free Will

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.

I wear the chain I forged in life....I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable; it is precisely thereby that it attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it.

Free will I have often heard of, but I have never seen it. I have always met with will, and plenty of it, but it has either been led captive by sin or held in the blessed bonds of grace.

Submit to the fate of your own free will.

No man need fear death, he need fear only that he may die without having known his greatest power: the power of his free will to give his life for others

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.

Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will

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.

If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.

Wise guidance never violates people's Free Will. A superior who demands obedience of his subordinates should show respect for their capacity to understand, and also for their Innate Right to their own Free Will.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life.

The forces of good and evil are working within and around me, I must choose, and in a free will universe I do have a choice.

Free will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.

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.