613 Quotes About Free-will

gold light burned faintly.From his cosy window seat, Mario was tracing a frost-flower on the windowpane with an unsure finger. Were its perfectly-rendered geometric patterns a product of nature, or were they an artefact of metaphysics? Was the frost-flower to the Masters what a work of Art was to him? Did the Masters of Strings truly control every aspect of reality?The fractal flower slowly melted under Mario’s fingertip.“No work of chance here,” he bitterly thought. “This was by design.

He was no marionette after all, but an autonomous individual in a staged performance; a production carefully arranged and assembled on his discrete behalf.And he, Mario Fantoccio, had been invited on-stage to perform.

Piecing a quilt is like living the gospel. You start out with pieces of cloth - whatever old pieces you have. That's the destiny part. It's what you start with, what you have given to you in life. Then you take all those pieces and make the design you want to have. You give them meaning and purpose. That's the free will. ... So when you make a quilt, remember what the pieces mean.

I was born with survival instincts inbuilt. My heart beats outside of my control. My body asks for fuel when it needs it. My actions are dictated by the society I live in. So, what role do I actually play in my own life, apart from being a supervisor of my material body?

Without our flaws we would be like a well-oiled machine, and our actions and thoughts could be predicted through simulation, if we only had sufficient processing power. That will never happen. Our flaws are a variable outside the scope of such a calculation, and they drive us to great achievements or to utterly despicable deeds.

[F]or, living our lives, as our bodies live for us, we are not at all clockwork; we do not feel ourselves to be clockwork; each second is new to us, quicksilver and unexpected, undefined.

Free will is never without charge and is costliest when an individual chooses selfishness and avarice over the common good. Some think animals dumb but mark the instinctive co-operation of insects while men murder and steal and tell me we are superior.

Is a man ruled by his own free will, or is he a composite of all his experiences, his education and heredity?

You could clone Elvis Presley and, while the clone would look identical, it would not have the utterly unique life experiences that made The King who he was. After all that time, effort and expense, the clone might choose to be a gardener instead of a singer! There's also the ethical dilemma of recreating all the genetic problems Elvis had due to his maternal grandparents being first cousins.