Rod Serling Quotes

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

Well, if I'm only a result of past causes, then I'm a victim of those past causes. There is no deeper meaning behind things that gives me a reason to be here.

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

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

I frankly confess that even if it were possible I should not wish to have free choice given to me, or to have anything left in my own hands by which I might strive for salvation.

You can't fight your fate...It is predestined.

Choice is destiny's soul mate.

I come down on the side of free will but I have sympathy for those who believe in fate because there is something about life which we feel we have no control over.

No one's born with their destiny stamped on their forehead ... we make the choices to fulfill our destiny.

Sometimes I think I'm a nihilist because it doesn't matter, none of this matters. We're all following the will of some unknowable higher power, probably the stars manipulating our cellular magnets. We think we have all this agency, but do we? Do we really? Can you choose to be brave when you were born a coward? Can we be deprogrammed from the brainwashing that we grew up in? I think we can, but I think we need a lot of help.

I am not a fatalist. I have just been reading War and Peace and Tolstoy is such a fatalist. I think people can make a difference... I am an optimist who worries a lot.

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.

What can i tell you about the choices we make? Fate reads like the polar opposite of decision, and so much of life reads like fate.

As I get older, I think that things have been pre-determined for me, whether I liked it or wanted it, wished for it, whatever, way before in some way. And with others, you do have a choice that you can change. And that choice that you make is still part of this grand scheme.

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.

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.

So if reality is all a spell, and you don't really want what you think you want... If you have no free will. You don't really know what you know. You don't really love who you only think you love. What do you have left to live for?

We seal our fate with the choices we make.

I hate the word "inevitable" because I feel like things don't have to be the way they are.

Virtually all men of action incline to Fatality just as most thinkers incline to Providence.

You have to be proactive about your destiny and then realize that the other half of it is completely out of your control. I think it's fascinating.

It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.

Nothing happens without intention, Willem. Nothing. This theory of yours - life is rules by accidents - isn't that just one huge excuse for passivity?