Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes

To extinguish the free will is to strike the conscience with death, for both have but one and the same life.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

A human being is a deciding being.

I am very comfortable with the idea that we can override biology with free will.

It is the ability to choose which makes us human.

If the concept of consciousness were to fall to science, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will? If conscious experience were reduced somehow to mere matter in motion, what would happen to our appreciation of love and pain and dreams and joy? If conscious human beings were just animated material objects, how could anything we do to them be right or wrong?

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

You want to make your own decisions, but you ought to make those decisions with an eternal perspective.

Choice, I've always believed, is all that separates us from animals.

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.

When one talks about being like a dead corpse in the hands of a spiritual teacher it means being able to surrender one's will, specially one's nafs al ammarah, that is a part of our soul which is again a Quranic term, which commands us to evil - we must surrender that. That's what it means. It doesn't make you become part of a cog of a machine.

To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

The Droid I had actually seemed to have free will, which I thought was interesting.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

We should reflect on the idea that since the beginning of time sentient beings have been mentally unstable because they have been slaves of delusion, they lack the eye of wisdom to see the path leading to nirvana and enlightenment, and they lack the necessary guidance of a spiritual teacher. Moment by moment they are indulging in negative actions, which will eventually bring about their downfall.

Maybe, just maybe, I would like to become a real spiritual teacher, a working lama!

Each human being has been granted a virtue: the capacity to choose. For he who does not use this virtue, it becomes a curse - and others will always choose for him.

Nature gives man corn but he must grind it; God gives man a will but he must make the right choices.

Wrong is wrong only when you are at liberty to choose.

The Truth must be told at all costs, no matter how unpopular it may be. The authentic spiritual leader, having freed himself of his own false need to be popular, tells the Truth whether it falls on fertile or stony ground. Such a teacher is the salt of the earth, though few know it. If you think the world is delirious as is, you would find it intolerable without his healing influence.

You look like a human being, but you don't have a mind of your own.

My free will is a paradoxical partner of the power of intention.

Why doesn't God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.

The first gift that Adam and Eve received was agency: ‘Thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee’ (Moses 3:17). You have that same agency. Use it wisely to deny acting on any impure impulse or unholy temptation that may come into your mind. Just do not go there, and if you are already there, come back out of it. ‘Deny yourselves of all ungodliness’ (Moroni 10:32).

What is the freedom of the most free? To do what is right!