Joseph de Maistre Quotes

The loss of free will I find unacceptable - what most of us refer to as rights.

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.

When we say that prayer puts God to work, it is simply to say that man has it in his power by prayer to move God to work in His own way among men, in which way He would not work if prayer was not made.

Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives.

To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.

Aegistheus, the kings have another secret.... Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the Gods can do nothing against that man. It is a matter for men to handle amongst themselves, and it is up to other men and to them alone to let him flee or to destroy him.

Events of all sorts creep or fly exactly as God pleases.

He who falls, falls by his own will, and he who stands, stands by God's will.

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.

Providence The will of God acting together with human will. But he respects our will absolutely. He does not force. Love never forces. It only invites. ... There is a war between good and

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.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

The fact that God knows everything does not mean that He is directly causing everything. He respects our freedom at our level. He makes it possible for us to act freely. If He didn't, we wouldn't act at all - we wouldn't be at all.

All things are ordered by God, but His providence takes in our free agency, as well as His own sovereignty.

Our prayers cannot force God to do anything, but He uses them as His own instruments to bring about His will.

Man's will and God's grace rise and fall together

God never does anything accidentally.

Anyway, you know good and well it would be beyond the will of God, and the grace of the King

If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?

If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence

Because the will renewed is the Lord's work, it is wrongly attributed to man that he obeys prevenient grace with his will as attendant.

It having been said above that God bends all the reprobate, and even Satan himself, at his will, three objections are started. First, that this happens by the permission, not by the will of God. To this objection there is a twofold reply, the one, that angels and men, good and bad, do nothing but what is appointed by God; the second, that all movements are secretly directed to their end by the hidden inspiration of God.

Allah created my tongue to speak. I don't have freedom to come , because Allah created my feet to walk. So I walk, and I speak, and I look, and I hear according to what God says.

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.

...for the question is of will, and not, as the insanity of logic has assumed of power. It is not that the Deity cannot modify his laws, but that we insult him in imagining a possible necessity for modification. In their origin these laws were fashioned to embrace all contingencies which could lie in the future. With God all is Now.