Ludwig Borne Quotes

Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

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

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

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?

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!

We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.

He who believes in freedom of the will has never loved and never hated.

The intuition of free will gives us the truth.

As far as I can see, it's not important that we have free will, just as long as we have the illusion of free will to stop us going mad.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road

A wise man will see to it that his act always seems voluntary and not done be compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.

Well you don’t have to do it.

It is never easy to cleanly distinguish freedom and duty, consent and bondage, choice and compulsion.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

There is a distinction between total control and enjoying total freedom.

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

Choice is destiny's soul mate.

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?

Destiny is a worrying concept. I don't want to be fated, I want to choose.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.