Philosophy & Thought: Free Will & Fate Quotes

"No one is to blame. It is neither their fault nor ours. It is the misfortune of being born when a whole world is dying"

Alexander Herzen, Journalist

"Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar"

Kenneth L. Pike, Sociologist

"I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap"

Jacques Derrida, Philosopher

"The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation"

Stephen Crane, Writer

"He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid"

Stephen Crane, Writer

"Destiny is the invention of the cowardly and the resigned"

Ignazio Silone, Author

"We seal our fate with the choices we take, but don't give a second thought to the chances we take"

Gloria Estefan, Musician

"Which reminds me of a fortune cookie: you often find your destiny on the path you take to avoid it"

Hector Elizondo, Actor

"Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will"

G. Stanley Hall, Psychologist

"Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity"

Joyce Carol Oates, Novelist

"The worst cynicism: a belief in luck"

Joyce Carol Oates, Novelist

"While trying to protect the republic, the conspirators in Julius Caesar enable Mark Antony to triumph. In Rose Rage, the more Henry VI tries to fix things, the more they go wrong"

Edward Hall, Lawyer

"It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence"

Alva Noto, Artist

"Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence"

Alva Noto, Artist

"Character, I am sure, lies in the genes"

Taylor Caldwell, Author

Seth Lloyd, Educator

"Our ideal of the future is that she should continue to render that service of her own free will"

Henry Cabot Lodge, Politician

"The moment you're born, you're done for"

Arnold Bennett, Novelist

"Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes"

Meryl Streep, Actress

"But I don't actually adopt the point of view that our subjective impression of free will, which is a kind of indeterminacy behavior, comes from quantum mechanical indeterminacy"

Murray Gell-Mann, Physicist

"Far too often the choices reality proposes are such as to take away one's taste for choosing"

Jean Rostand, Scientist

"Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become"

Jean Rostand, Scientist

"The will is not free - it is a phenomenon bound by cause and effect - but there is something behind the will which is free"

Swami Vivekananda, Clergyman

"It is more difficult to designate this form of conation on its practical side by a satisfactory name"

Samuel Alexander, Philosopher

"An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought"

Samuel Alexander, Philosopher

"I truly, truly believe that I was going in that direction and all of a sudden fate took me and put me here. It's like something else has other plans for me"

Christopher Atkins, Actor

"Man has an incurable habit of not fulfilling the prophecies of his fellow men"

Alistair Cooke, Journalist

"I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available"

Howard Gardner, Psychologist

"It seems people are more willing to let other people control their minds now, and recreational drug use doesn't seem to have that same renegade sense of adventure that it once did"

Marc Maron, Entertainer

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

Angelus Silesius, Poet

"We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts"

Mary Wortley Montagu, Writer

"Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances"

Samuel E. Morison, Historian

"I think you end up doing the stuff you were supposed to do at the time you were supposed to do it"

Robert Downey, Jr., Actor

"All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks"

Michelangelo Antonioni, Director

"I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism"

Herbert Croly, Author

"Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are"

Katherine Dunn, Novelist

"The second is the structure and source of cults. They have always haunted me, and I wanted to explore the fundamental notion of giving up responsibility to an outside power"

Katherine Dunn, Novelist

"Maybe our mistakes are what make our fate"

Sarah Jessica Parker, Actress

"I don't really believe in palm readers and crystal balls and tarot cards, but I respond to the need for them"

Stephan Jenkins, Musician

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