Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

I have never believed that things happen by themselves.

She bent her finger and then straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending... . And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind.

We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.

I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had.

Where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power to not act.

Things don't just happen, people make them happen

When we think the universe moves. When we think we actually cause things to happen.

Thought is the soul of act.

I would like to think there is a reason and a choice behind everything.

Liberty is that principle of spontaneity, or self-determination, which constitutes us as agents, or which gives us a command over our actions, rendering them properly ours, and not effects of the operation of any foreign cause

We try to separate the world into the stuff we can control and the stuff we can't.

The fact that the underlying laws of physics are deterministic and impersonal does not mean that at the human level we can't talk about ideas about reasons and goals and purposes and free will.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that's true or not, I know the intention was there. Becasue when I want something to happen-or not happen- I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

Each of our acts makes a statement as to our purpose.

Choice is destiny's soul mate.

While life is in your body, you have the rein of all thoughts in your hands.

But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.

I can believe a miracle because I can raise my own arm. I can believe a miracle because I can remember. I can believe it because I can speak and be understood by you.

For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from the self.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

No action will be considered blameless, unless the will was so, for by the will the act was dictated.

The issue is not whether or not you have that power, the issue is whether or not you use it.

We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren’t anything else.

I think people have some control over what they want; there's a relationship - maybe not automatic - between what you want and get.