Blaise Pascal Quotes

If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?

Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.

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

We are unable to recognize the laws of necessity if we believe we are free

It is never easy to cleanly distinguish freedom and duty, consent and bondage, choice and compulsion.

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

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

There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.

But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy.

God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.

It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

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 wise man will see to it that his act always seems voluntary and not done be compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can't talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.

You can't push and force people to do what they don't want to do.

You can't try to keep someone against their will, or it's difficult to get them to listen or have the right mentality.

I think people don't want to be persuaded. And people don't even like to do the persuading.

Can we really choose anything?' 'Maybe. If we want to bad enough.

The Fates guide those who will and drag those who won't!