Quotes · Skopia

16 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Free will✕clear

Treatise · Political literature · Philosophical literature

God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The Prince · 1532

★ 7.9

Essay · Historical literature · Political literature

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte · 1852

★ 6.3

Play · History (play) · Tragedy (play)

Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 5.6

The only freedom the gods grant us Is this: to submit Of our own free will to their sovereignty We should do just that, Since only in the illusion of freedom Does freedom exist.

Fernando Pessoa

1914

★ 5.0

Philosophical literature

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

58

★ 3.9

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

The greatest gift which God in His bounty Bestowed in creating, And the most conformed to His own goodness And that which He most prizes, was the freedom of the will, With which the creatures that have intelligence, They all and they alone, were and are endowed.

Dante Alighieri

Paradiso · 1321

★ 3.9

Religious literature

For man proposes, but God disposes.

Thomas a Kempis

The Imitation of Christ · 1427

★ 3.9

Personal journal · Philosophical literature

Whatever befalls you was prepared for you beforehand from eternity, and the thread of causes was spinning from everlasting both your existence and this which befalls you.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations · 180

★ 3.8

Play · Comedy (play)

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven.

William Shakespeare

All's Well that Ends Well · 1616

★ 3.6

Film · Dystopian (film) · Crime (film) · Dystopian · Crime

Goodness is chosen. When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Prison Governor

A Clockwork Orange · 1971

★ 3.6

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a point when choice was any more than sum of all the choices gone before?

1963

★ 3.5

Philosophical literature

What place can be left for random action, when God constraineth all things to order?

The Consolation of Philosophy · 523

★ 2.1

TV program · Crime (TV) · Drama (TV) · Crime · Drama

Genetic predispositions are only that: predispositions. It’s not a destiny written in stone. People have choices.

Dr. Jennifer Melfi

The Sopranos · 1999

★ 2.1

Play · Tragedy (play)

There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

William Shakespeare

Hamlet · 1616

★ 1.9

Scientific literature

"You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

1994

★ 1.8

Free will and determinism... Are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play your hand represents free will.

1951

★ 1.7