Belief is involuntary; nothing involuntary is meritorious or reprehensible. A man ought not to be considered worse or better for his belief.
If a man by the terror of present death, be compelled to do a fact against the Law, he is totally Excused; because no Law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation.
A strange, terrific force unlike anything I've ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will--over and over.
I tend to be emotional when... I breathe.
Yawns are hard to refute.
I have no idea what I did. I heard people talk about dead leg, shake, change of pace and all that, but I did things without thinking about them.
Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.
Whenever the government is involved, there is an element of coercion.
All beginnings are involuntary.
Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.
I'm one of the people that when I wake up I have to do what I do. It's not like I want to do it. I kind of have to do it.
All natural results are spontaneous. The diamond sparkles without effort, and the flowers open impulsively beneath the summer rain. And true religion is a spontaneous thing,--as natural as it is to weep, to love, or to rejoice.
It's no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.
All birth is unwilling.
I didn't intend. The word "intend" is the wrong word for what I do. It's just that it's something you do, and you can't not do. If you want to do it, and you don't intend to, you do it anyway. The word "intend" is wrong. The word "pressure" is right. It's like any art form.
INTENTION, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the imminence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act.
Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love.
Only to the rational animal is it given to follow voluntarily what happens; but simply to follow is a necessity imposed on all.
It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat.
The President was asked by a high school boy how he became a war hero:
It seems to me that the only way one can be helpful is to extend one's hand to someone else involuntarily, and without ever knowing how useful this will be.
I wanted to know more about the young ... strange that though they laughed so loud, they so seldom smiled. Perhaps laughter was involuntary whereas smiling was part of an attitude to life.
Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.
I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.
I had no intention of entering politics, but then the force of events led me to become involved in politics.
Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.