#free-will

"To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures."

"According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it."

"You can do what you decide to do — but you cannot decide what you will decide to do."

"Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details."

"The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway."

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

"For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John."

"So it follows that those who have reason have freedom to will or not to will, although this freedom is not equal in all of them. [...] human souls are more free when they persevere in the contemplation of the mind of God, less free when they descend to the corporeal, and even less free when they are entirely imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood."

"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty."

"... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!"

"You cannot hinder someone’s free will, that’s the first law of the Universe, no matter what the decision."

"I'm convinced that most men don't know what they believe, rather, they only know what they wish to believe. How many people blame God for man's atrocities, but wouldn't dream of imprisoning a mother for her son's crime?"

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."

"If there was no free will in men, then there is no sins. When sins happened, it was 'free will' that made them doable. This is true, unless God has predestined human to do and to have sins."

"God isn't about making good things happen to you, or bad things happen to you. He's all about you making choices--exercising the gift of free will. God wants you to have good things and a good life, but He won't gift wrap them for you. You have to choose the actions that lead you to that life."

"Freedom is an absolute state, there is no such thing as being half-free."

"We are the sum total of the decisions we have made."

"No one has free will until they are an adult, and by then the choices that were made for them, have already set them on a course that gives limited freedom in the choices to be made."