Mark Helprin Quotes

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

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.

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe ? Another act of willing?

If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you'd see you are a totally determined being.

Our lives are not totally random. We make commitments, we cause things to happen.

If people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, "Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined that I will get."

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

I have never believed that things happen by themselves.

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.

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.

I used to very politely say that if there is free will then it's in all sorts of boring places, like whether you're going to pick up this or that fork as you begin your meal. There really is none: It's all biology.

Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?

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.

The metaphysical doctrine of determinism simply asserts that all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined. It does not assert that they are known to anybody, or predictable by scientific means. But it asserts that the future is as little changeable as is the past. Everybody knows what we mean when we say that the past cannot be changed. It is in precisely the same sense that the future cannot be changed, according to metaphysical determinism.

I knew it like destiny, and at the same time, I knew it as choice.

Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?

Everything that happens, happens of necessity.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

God's is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.

We make choices and are in turn made by them.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.