Neale Donald Walsch Quotes

Every person has free choice. Free to obey or disobey the Natural Laws. Your choice determines the consequences. Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

If a motive affects me, and I am compelled to act on it because it proves to be the 'strongest' of its kind, then the thought of freedom ceases to have any meaning. How should it matter to me whether I can do a thing or not, if I am forced by the motive to do it?

You are free to choose. You are not free not to choose. No choice is a choice. You are free to choose but you are not free to choose the consequences of that choice.

Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a part of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.

The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.

Circumstances define us; they force us onto one road or another, and then they punish us for it.

I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder.

If any man err from the right way, it is his own misfortune, no injury to thee; nor therefore art thou to punish him in the things of this life because thou supposest he will be miserable in that which is to come.

If I do bad, shoot me.

All sin and all crime comes from the same thing: 'I decided. I decided this was okay.'

People shouldn't be punished for their wisdom.

There will be good and bad, right and wrong. Your reaction of choice, good or bad, has consequences that affect you and those around you.

The most disturbing thing, I think, with people that do very morally devious things more and more often is to see that they completely feel that they had no choice in the matter.

We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

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

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

Choice is the essence of ethics: if there were no choice there would be no ethics, no good, no evil; good and evil have meaning only insofar as man is free to choose.

Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.

It is a most just punishment, that man should lose that freedom, which man could not use, yet had power to keep, if he would; and that he who had knowledge to do what was right, and did not should be deprived of the knowledge of what was right; and that he who would not do righteously, when he had the power, should lose the power to do it, when he had the will.

I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!

Man has free choice, or otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain.

To spare the guilty is to injure the innocent.