free-will

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.

Spiritual is criterion, where free will exists in plenty.

I believe in free will. I think we make our own decisions and carry out or own actions. And our actions have consequences. The world is what we make it. But I think sometimes we can ask God to help us and He will.

The greatest of all capabilities of a human being is to become born again.

Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil.They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense.

Stress can alter the expression of genes, which can affect the response to stress and so on. Human behavior is therefore unpredictable in the short term, but broadly predictable in the long term.

It's the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is FREE. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what to the religions do with this? They say, "Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us." The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the fact of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.

This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually perceives is meaningless chaos __ chaos of which the heightened form, the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an intense degree, is war.

Our desires are guided by what we believe to be good or bad; our beliefs are directed by our knowledge; our knowledge, in turn, is again a manipulation of our desires. Our Will, during this inexorable revolution, serves as the force, increasing, decreasing, or at worst, maintaining the pace.

It is likely to make us think we are not caged. We cannot feel the bars unless we push against them.

You are not the happy, unthinking child you have always appeared to be, accepting everything at its face value. You are not just one of the women of the household. You are Renisenb who wants to think for herself, who wonders about other people.

I am not a Sunday morning inside four wallswith clean bloodand organized drawers.I am the hurricane setting fire to the forestsat night when no one else is aliveor awakehowever you choose to see itand I live in my own flamessometimes burning too bright and too wildto make things lastor handlemyself or anyone elseand so I run.run run runfar and wideuntil my bones ache and lungs splitand it feels good.Hear that people? It feels goodbecause I am the slave and ruler of my own bodyand I wish to do with it exactly as I please

Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.

Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.

Oh, as Dean says, nobody is free - never, except just for a few brief moments now and then, when the flash comes, or when as on my haystack night, the soul slips over into eternity for a little space. All the rest of our years we are slaves to something - traditions - conventions - ambitions - relations.

You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!

A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.

In the secret recesses of man's nature the grace is given disposing and enabling him to yield. Though the will must at last act from its own resources and deliberate impulse, it is influenced through the feeling and the understanding in such a manner as to give it strength. It is utterly hopeless to penetrate this mystery: it is the secret between God's Spirit and man's agency. There is a Divine operation which works the desire and acts in such a manner as not to interfere with the natural freedom of the will. The man determines himself, through Divine grace, to salvation: never so free as when swayed by grace.