Quotes by American Authors - Page 296

God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, 'What doest thou?' Man’s will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.
A.W. Tozer
There’s an alternate view. That no man or woman alive is the disempowered victim of another’s degrading circumstance. Each is equipped to pursue their own fate. No one needs saving.
Janny Wurts
There was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it.
Daryl Gregory
You can let yourself off the hook anytime you want, Liz. That's the divine contract of a little something we call free will.
Elizabeth Gilbert
A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.
A.W. Tozer
We have to believe in free will, we have no other choice.
James Rozoff
...your life is yours to shape as you wish with free will...
Dean Koontz
Yet our ability to exercise free will and transcend the most extraordinary obstacles does not make the conditions of our life irrelevant. Most of us struggle and often fail to meet the biggest challenges of our lives. Even the smaller challenges—breaking a bad habit or sticking to a diet—often prove too difficult, even for those of us who are relatively privileged and comfortable in our daily lives. In fact, what is most remarkable about the hundreds of thousands of people who return from prison to their communities each year is not how many fail, but how many somehow manage to survive and stay out of prison against all odds.
Michelle Alexander
Love was as flawed and terrible and beautiful as we were. To be alive meant looking for it in ourselves and in others, an imperfection searching for an impossible perfection.Because in that journey was where truth resided.Love wasn’t about being held. It was about being freed.
Emma Raveling
It is possible to become discouraged about the injustice we see everywhere. But God did not promise us that the world would be humane and just. He gives us the gift of life and allows us to choose the way we will use our limited time on earth. It is an awesome opportunity.
César Chávez
With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement
Lauren DeStefano
I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.
Norman Lock
God decided to create a world where free will was more important than no one ever getting hurt. There must be something stunningly beautiful and remarkable about free will that only God can truly grasp, because God hates, literally abhors, evil, yet He created a world where evil could happen if people chose it.
Dee Henderson
The first guy asks the second guy, 'Do you believe in free will?' The second guy answers, 'I have no choice.
Tim Floreen
It made you wonder: How much of our lives was just luck or good timing, and how much was actually choice? How could it be that tiny serendipitous events could change everything? And if lucky events could change everything, could minor mishaps have the same power?
Aditi Khorana
In reality, man is a mosaic of wills; and the will of each instinct, each desire, each purpose, is the intensity of that instinct, desire or purpose.
Myerson Abraham Myerson
Nothing is compulsory. Free will is paramount. But free will comes with the burden of consequences.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
Laura said faintly, 'I thought God takes care of us.''He does,' Pa said, 'so far as we do what's right. And He gives us a conscience and brains to know what's right. But He leaves it to us to do as we please. That's the difference between us and everything else in creation.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Duty eats free will for breakfast.
Daryl Gregory
In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.
Daniel C. Dennett
You’ve followed Malexia for years. You have done terrible things. So, if as you say, you have a will of your own, did you do those things because you were ordered, or did you do them of your own free will?
T.T. Escurel
And because God's love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him - we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, God's power, is itself powerless.
Frederick Buechner
Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
Sam Harris
So saving grace, converting grace, for Augustine, is God's giving us a sovereign joy in God that triumphs over all other joys and therefore sways the will. The will is free to move toward whatever it delights in most fully, but it is not within the power of our will to determine what that sovereign joy will be.
John Piper
How can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
Sam Harris
This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
Neal Stephenson
...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.
Flannery O'Connor
The future is an ever-shifting maze of possibilities until it becomes the present. The future I have shown you tonight is not yet fixed. But it is more likely to become so with the passing of every day because nothing is being done to turn it aside. If you would change it, do as I have told you.
Terry Brooks
[Gonturan] is a true friend, but a friend with thoughts of her own, and the thoughts of others are dangerous.
Robin McKinley
I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said.
Mark Lawrence
He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.
Cormac McCarthy
We're deciding the fate of the multiverse with a flip of a coin. Heads or tails, doc. If that isn't a game, I don't know what is.
E.C. Myers
We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?
Jodi Picoult
…Amongst these legends of dragon hoards,Where secret, precious things are stored,There golden nugget and diamond shard,There treasure-keeper hoped to guard.As bolted doorway securely braced,hoping its treasures to ever hold,hoping beyond when time grows old,So stood the keeper in its place.A statue of unrelenting stanceStill stands victim to happenstance,For treasure-keeper did not bargainon a bit of chance and a bit of dwargen…”- Dwenzuak the dwargen
T. William Watts
The most critical risk of all, is not taking the risk if means be dangerous.
Anthony Liccione
You're a beautiful young woman walking without an escort at one in the morning. Why doesn't one of your staff at least see you to your car?""Because they're not sexist pigs who think women are incapable of taking care of themselves."Chance rolled his eyes. "This has nothing to do with feminism. I'm all for gender equality, but the fact remains that women are targeted for more specific crimes than men, and the perpetrators of those crimes often look for circumstances such as these to attack.""See this?" Isa pulled something dark and oblong out of her purse. Chance's mouth twitched."Turbo Vag
Jeaniene Frost
I'm not so stupid as to believe that you've completely forgotten about your former boyfriend. I know you think there are others here more suited for me and this life, and I wouldn't want you to rush into trying to be happy with any of this. I just... I just want to know if it's possible...
Kiera Cass
It's my job to worry about you. I'm in love with you, Stacy. I have been ever since I can remember. It's always been you.
Barbra Annino
You're the most important person in my life," I whispered. "You're the only man I ever let in.""But I'm not in, Stace. I'm standing on the porch in the pouring rain, waiting for you to open the door. I've been waiting ever since you left after graduation, ever since you came back last year. Even now, you've let me into your bed, but not into your heart. I'm still waiting.
Barbra Annino
He's throwing everything he can into the air on the chance that something might take flight. And we're the smallest, weakest bird.
Ally Condie
We are living now.We shall not live long.No one should tell us we shall live again.This is our little while.This is our chance.
Susan Glaspell
You could become paralyzed with worry about what might happen to your family, or if you hadn’t yet had children you could decide not to, as a sort of proactive damage control. Either way, you would be derailing your life voluntarily out of fear that it might become ruined by chance. Or you could pick up and move on. Those were the only choices.
Nichole Bernier
Take a chance on God. After all, He took a chance on you.
Susan May Warren
Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive -- you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.
David Levithan
The idea that their paths might have easily not crossed leaves her breathless, like a near-miss accident on a highway, and she can't help marveling at the sheer randomness of it all. Like any survivor of chance, she feels a quick rush of thankfulness, part adrenaline and part hope.
Jennifer E. Smith
Accidents are built into the road.
Marty Rubin
I rely on one thing in this world:my actions. I will leave nothing to chance and prefer playing the game of life with thestrongest hand possible.
Liv Morris
So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.
Roger Ebert
The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.
Paul Auster
You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.
Earl Weaver
I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothI took the one less travled by,And that has made all the difference.As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67
Milton Friedman
Just maybe I was worthy of love.
Abbi Glines
It's funny isn't it? People claim to know what love is -- yet the minute they're given the opportunity to prove it -- they bail.
Rachel Van Dyken
It’s a number.”“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a chance to wake up new.
Rainbow Rowell
Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.
Richard Powers
In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. Irish Mary, Eva's sister, would have been happy enough to accept my father's ring, I suppose, had Eva not chosen to stay in Ireland and marry Tom. My mother's first fiancé would have married her gladly if he hadn't been kept too long overseas by the Navy, if my father hadn't beaten him home, on points, a full year before. It might have been Cody or John in the car with your father, that day on Long Island. I might have been gone. Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar's courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.
Alice McDermott
One chance--that's what she had seen she had--one flying leap that was really composed of eight thousand separate possibilities for falling, and she had taken that chance and come this far and been found out.
Haven Kimmel
Some people get more of a chance to show who they are. Other people never get the chance.
Todd Strasser
But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?
Sherman Alexie
The chance to do it over again is called now.
J.R. Rim