Cormac McCarthy Quotes

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

Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

A philosophy of freedom must set out from the experience of thinking, for it is through this experience of thinking that a human being discovers his own self, finds his bearings as an independent personality.

From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.

I can't tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I've got a good bead on myself.

A man really determines himself by what he does.

Nine times out of 10, extenuating circumstances aside, I believe that people are where they are by some kind of choice on their part. You need to acknowledge that, 'Hey, I'm here because I steered my horse in this direction.'

Nothing in your past is in your present making you do anything you don't choose to do. You are not your past history! You are not your past failures! You are not how others have at one time treated you! You are only who you are and what you do now in this moment.

People make their own destinies.

We are pretty firm believers in the fact that you make your own fate, with or without the Facebook ordeal.

I can't control other people, what their beliefs are.

We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls.

The person who has the most to do what happens to you in life is you. Not somebody else and not the environment.

I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.

If I was going to act irresponsibly, the least I could do was be responsible for it.

For a man to act himself, he must be perfectly free; otherwise he is in danger of losing all sense of responsibility or of self- respect.

Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.

Another person's life is that person's life. You can't take responsibility.

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

I don't think ultimately God punishes. I think we bring about our own destruction or our own creation.

Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence.

The essential religion is taking the whole responsibility for whatsoever you are. And immediately an insight arises: 'If I am responsible for my suffering, then it is simple, I can drop it. It is my choice. I will not choose it any more.'

Accept that you are where you are and what you are because of your own choices and decisions.

We have opted for petty determinisms - childhood trauma, genetic inheritance, social conditioning, etc. - that have made us comparatively passive. We seem to prefer to find excuses - which are really nothing more than the embrace of determinism, a sort of Stockholm syndrome relative to whatever we can claim as limitation. I am fascinated by the more enabling self-understanding. It has helped me to find my way out of the cloying comforts that are offered by prevalent psychological models.

In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.