M. Esther Harding Quotes

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.

The neutral view of free will is impossible. It involves choice without desire.

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.

Agency presupposes choice.

A part of fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

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

The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free.

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.

If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

If God is, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle; now, therefore, let all choose.

If we grant freedom to man, there is an end to the omniscience of God.

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

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe ? Another act of willing?

Free will is the sensation of making a choice. The sensation is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.

In order not to annul our free will, I judge it true that Fortune may be mistress of one half our actions but then even she leaves the other half, or almost, under our control.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.

The choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determines who we are