Simone Weil Quotes

Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.

I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

Mankind's greatest gift... is that we have free choice.

The will of man is by his reason sway'd.

But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.

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

Nobody is bound by any obligation unless it has first been freely accepted.

I am free to choose my own actions. Indeed, like everyone else, I must be so. A good act that is compelled is not goodness at all, but merely force.

God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life.

The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.

The ability to choose is at the essential core of our grandeur. Even evil exists because God respects our ability to choose.

Freedom in the practical sense is the independence of the power of choice from necessitation by impulses of sensibility

The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

My understanding is that you get to choose which of your thoughts to go with.

Free will is the liberty to choose what is right according to Gods law.

I don't ever want to be the type of person to tell you what to think or what to believe. Whatever stage in your life that you are in, I want you to organically reach whatever conclusions that you possibly reach.

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.

Man ultimately decides for himself! And in the end, education must be education towards the ability to decide

You are responsible for what you give your attention to.

By right, as the word is employed in this subject, has always been understood discretion, that is, a full and complete power of either doing a thing or omitting it, without the person's becoming liable to animadversion or censure from another, that is, in other words, without his incurring any degree of turpitude or guilt. Now in this sense I affirm that man has no rights, no discretionary power whatever.

The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.

Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.

Virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also does vice. For where we are free to act we are also free to refrain from acting, and where we are able to say No we are also able to say Yes; if therefore we are responsible for doing a thing when to do it right, we are also responsible for not doing it when not to do it is wrong, and if we are responsible for rightly not doing a thing, we are also responsible for wrongly doing it.