Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea.

So, after all, we are but puppets, creatures of our fate, not commanding it but being molded by it.

One way to pick a future is to believe it’s inevitable.

As I get older, I think that things have been pre-determined for me, whether I liked it or wanted it, wished for it, whatever, way before in some way. And with others, you do have a choice that you can change. And that choice that you make is still part of this grand scheme.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was. Sometimes I feel ensnared in this, as if no matter what I do, what will come has already been fixed.

I hate the word "inevitable" because I feel like things don't have to be the way they are.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

The Bible, contrary to what people think, actually puts forth a strong case for no free will, no free will.

So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

Consciousness is a pitiful hostage of its flesh-envelope, whose surges, circuits, and secret murmurings it cannot stay or speed. This is the chthonian drama that has no climax but only an enedless round, cycle upon cycle. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm. Free will is stillborn in the red cells of our body, for there is no free will in nature. Our choices come to us prepackaged and special delivery, molded by hands not our own.

PREDESTINATION, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme. . . . not be confused with that of foreordination. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore.

If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised at the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.

If we saw tomorrow's newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.

There is no free will if to exercise it in certain ways produces punishment. That makes a mockery of free will and renders it counterfeit.

Two times two will be four even without my will. Is that what you call man's free will?

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.

Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.

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.

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

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 there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical.

The Bible puts forth a strong case for no free will and that's a real problem you know, because the justification for supposedly being punished after death is that you had free will. If you didn't have free will and you did what God predetermined, then how can he punish you?"

The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration.