Gayle Forman Quotes

I think you manifest what you believe, and when you believe that you have no choice you lose choice.

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings?

I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.

When you know your intention, you are in a position to choose the consequences that you will create for yourself. When you choose an intention that creates consequences for which you are willing to be responsible, that is a responsible choice.

I have never believed that things happen by themselves.

Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.

I learned from Jehovah's Witnesses that a fatalistic view is counterproductive.

Intellectually, I believe there's no free will.

I'm not sure I understand how responsibility for our choices makes sense if they are not determined.

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.

We have opted for petty determinisms - childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc. - that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses - which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models.

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at right time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.

Take responsibility for making conscious choices.

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

There are no mistakes or accidents. The present is malleable. Influence the odds. Free will is your pen, write your life.

In the traditional view, a person is free. He is autonomous in the sense that his behavior is uncaused. He can therefore be held responsible for what he does and justly punished if he offends. That view, together with its associated practices, must be re-examined when a scientific analysis reveals unsuspected controlling relations between behavior and environment.

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

All things happen by virtue of necessity.

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will...Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

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."

Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect In this most profound way, we are held responsible for every action, thought, and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Even without the mushroom cloud still I would have hated Listen I would have done the same things even if there were no death I will not be held like a drunkard under the cold tap of facts I refuse the universal alibi