Seneca the Younger Quotes

If everyone is to be made responsible for everything they do, you must extend responsibility beyond the level of conscious intention.

He is not guilty who is not guilty of his own free will.

Each of our acts makes a statement as to our purpose.

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

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.

No one does wrong voluntarily.

There is a tendency among many shallow thinkers of our day to teach that every human act is a reflex, over which we do not exercise human control. They would rate a generous deed as no more praiseworthy than a wink, a crime as no more voluntary than a sneeze. . . Such a philosophy undercuts all human dignity. . . All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

How absurd to take the credit of doing the good act on oneself and lay the blame for the evil act on the Lord!

Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.

I still totally believe in individual rights and individual responsibility and in choosing to do good.

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.

It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?

Men not living to what they know, cannot blame God, that they know no more.

There exists in our society widespread fear of judging…[B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done…Who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it?

The mind sins, not the body; if there is no intention, there is no blame.

Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly.

INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.

Thought is the soul of act.

Nobody becomes guilty by fate.

The universe doesn't decide what's right or not right. You do.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

Kafka had the sense of guilt. I don't think I have because I don't believe in free will. Because what I have done has been done, well, for me or through me. But I haven't done it really. But I don't believe in free will, I can't feel guilty.