David Hume Quotes

Now, you receive all your ideas; therefore you receive your wish, you wish therefore necessarily. The word "liberty" does not therefore belong in any way to your will....The will, therefore, is not a faculty that one can call free. A free will is an expression absolutely void of sense, and what the scholastics have called will of indifference, that is to say willing without cause, is a chimera unworthy of being combated.

Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

If we have free will, by definition we cannot be granted it. We can't be given it. My [-audio-recording-distorted-] paradox states that 'Of course we have free will, we have no choice.' To say that it's a gift is to negate the whole concept of free will on its face. So, if that isn't self-evident, I can't think of anything that would meet the definition of being self-evident.

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

From my point of view, compatibilism is a little like saying: a puppet is free so long as it loves its strings.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

Compatibilism amounts to nothing more than an assertion of the following creed: A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.

The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.

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!

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

Even the absolute universality of the law of causality does not necessarily limit a person's freedom, because the law of causality not only enables him to explain the past and predict the future, but also encourages him to use his intelligence to create new causes and attain new results.

For, above all, I hold a notion of possibility and necessity according to which there are some things that are possible, but yet not necessary, and which do not really exist. From this it follows that a reason that always forces a free mind to choose one thing over another (whether that reason derives from the perfection of a thing, as it does in God, or from our imperfection) does not eliminate our freedom.

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

The neutral view of free will is impossible. It involves choice without desire.

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

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Everybody acts as if they have free will. They act as if they can make these decisions; do they know they don't? I think there's been some back-down on the idea that everything is determined.

Of course we have free will because we have no choice but to have it.

Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity.