Francis de Sales Quotes

The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them.

You are to do the choosing here and now during this exciting and wonderful time on earth. Moral agency, the freedom to choose, is certainly one of God's greatest gifts next to life itself. We have the honorable right to choose; therefore, we need to choose the right. This is not always easy.

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

Men are free to decide their own moral choices, but they are also under the necessity to account to God for those choices.

One might rationally argue that individual human beings should be free choose what moral behavior they approve of, and which they don't, subject to the constraints of the law.

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

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.

Without that freedom to sin there is also no freedom to love.

Evil comes from the abuse of free will.

And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference.

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

It cannot be called freedom, a freedom which can choose only the right and not the wrong; then that is not freedom.

If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

While early childhood experiences may impel, they do not compel. In the end, evil is a matter of choice.

Moral liberty is the power of following, in all circumstances, our sense of right and wrong, or of acting in conformity to our reflecting and moral principles, without being controlled by any contrary principles.

The more...we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good

All rational beings have an agency of their own; and according to their own choice they will be saved or damned.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

Liberty is an opportunity for doing good, but this is only so when it is also an opportunity for doing wrong.