Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

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.

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

Fate and free will are equally powerful forces but I consider free will to be more important as it is your free will that determines your fate.

We must believe in free will – we have no choice.

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.

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 all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will…Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure.

If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can’t predict what they will do.

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated
are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Life calls the tune, we dance.

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

And I will go as far as Martin Luther, in that strong assertion of his, where he says, “If any man ascribes any of salvation, even the very least, to the free-will of man, he knows nothing of grace, and he has not learned Jesus Christ aright.”

The greatest gift God gave us is also our greatest curse, which is the free will. We are made in God’s image, the Bible says, which means we have the ability to love him or not love him, to reject him or not reject him.

I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both free will and a benevolent higher power who protects you from yourself.

The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate.

But man is freer than all the animals, on account of his free-will, with which he is endowed above all other animals.

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

The essence of spiritual life is simply to use our free will properly.

Not all of life’s roads are set fast, for a man may do this or a man may do that and not even the gods know the mind of a man.

Let all the ‘free-will’ in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of meriting mercy if it is left to its own strength.

Remove grace, and you have nothing whereby to be saved. Remove free will and you have nothing that could be saved.

This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It’s almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it.

Free will carried many a soul to hell, but never a soul to heaven.

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

The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will.

One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.

Free will is the power of choosing good and evil.

The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.

Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ. My hope lies in another quarter. I hope that my Master will lay hold of some of them and say, “You are mine, and you shall be mine. I claim you for myself.” My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.

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.

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.

Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished

I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin’s; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will.

Shakespeare said: “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” Everything happens perfectly.

It’s true that there’s no such thing as free will. We can’t help what we are or what we do. It’s not our fault. Nobody’s to blame for anything. It’s all in your background … and your glands. If you’re good, that’s no achievement of yours – you were lucky in your glands. If you’re rotten, nobody should punish you – you were unlucky, that’s all.

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.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness on the confines of two everlasting empires, – Necessity and Free Will.

Of course I believe in free will. Do we have a choice?