Free Will Quotes
428 Free Will quotes by 307 unique authors
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Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical]…
— Clarence Darrow
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...one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one…
— Charles Darwin
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The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true…
— Baron d'Holbach
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If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it…
— Albert Einstein
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I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in…
— Albert Einstein
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I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in…
— Albert Einstein
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Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.
— Albert Einstein
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I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed…
— Thomas Jefferson
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All theory is against free will; all experience is for it.
— Samuel Johnson
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The human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.
— Abraham Lincoln
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When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying…
— Bertrand Russell
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You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
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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…
— Mark Twain
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The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active…
— Walter Bagehot
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Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which…
— Albert Camus
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Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is All striving is vain, will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly…
— William James
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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…
— Georg C. Lichtenberg
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I'm going to kill that god of yours, next. Then we'll see what you can do, and what you can't.
— Janet Morris
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It can even come about that a created will cancels out, not perhaps the exertion, but the result of divine action; for in this sense,…
— Joseph de Maistre
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One lot apiece, one chance to undo an error or secure a fate.
— Janet Morris
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We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of…
— Joseph de Maistre
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Here and now was always where Tempus was, not off somewhere in the realm of Greater Good or Mortal Soul or Eternal Consequence. He'd lost…
— Janet Morris
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The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent,…
— Friedrich Nietzsche
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Every woman who chooses - joyfully, thoughtfully, calmly, of their own free will and desire - not to have a child does womankind a massive…
— Caitlin Moran
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The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling.
— William Shatner
Who Wrote These Free Will Quotes
307 authors contributed a total of 428 Free Will Quotes, led by these top contributors: