"Freewill" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tradesmen. They had to study at the universities in the intervals, perhaps, of agricultural labour; and if the learning was slight and the scholarship below the English standard, the young aspirant had at least to learn to preach and to acquire such philosophy as would enable him to argue upon grace and freewill with some hard-headed Davie Deans. It was doubtless owing in part to these conditions that the Scottish universities produced many distinguished teachers throughout the century. Professors had to teach something which might at least pass for philosophy, though they were more or less ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... these plain principles any relation to the old difficulties of necessity and freewill. Every Freewillist holds that the special force of free volition is applied to the pre-existing forces of our corporeal structure; he does not consider it as an agency acting in vacuo, but as an agency acting upon other agencies. Every Freewillist ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... their burnt-offerings, the sin-offering of an individual and the trespass-offering of the Nazarite and the trespass-offering of the leper are allowed for thirty days and upward, and even on the thirtieth day. And if they are brought on the eighth day, they are allowed; vows, freewill-offerings, the first-born, and the tithe and the passover are allowed from the eighth day and upward, and even on the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... disapproval in the writings of Pelagius. Nevertheless a Capuchin named Louis Pereir of Dole, about the year 1630, wrote a book expressly to revive it, at least in relation to free actions. Some moderns incline thereto, and M. Bernier supports it in a little book on freedom and freewill. But one cannot say in relation to God what 'to conserve' is, without reverting to the general opinion. Also it must be taken into account that the action of God in conserving should have some reference to that which is conserved, according to what it is and to ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... on a Hill retired, In Thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, First Fate, Freewill, Foreknowledge absolute, And found no End in wandring ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... urged that, in dealing as above with my hypothetical criminal, I am assuming a state of things brought about by the influence of religions which include the dogmas of theology and the belief in freewill—a state, namely, in which a moral majority control and keep in awe an immoral minority. The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Withdraw, then, our theologic sanctions, including ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... central walk. Then, after the bed is thoroughly worked, manured, and graded, the plants are divided and reset, the leavings often serving as a sort of horticultural wampum, the medium of exchange among neighbours with gardens, or else going as a freewill offering to found a garden for one of the "plotters" who ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... unexpected result of that interview. But even as he wrote and rang for a messenger to carry the note to Park Street, he was conscious of an effort to seize upon and hold the fact that the woman he had so intensely desired was now his helpmate; and had, of her own freewill, united herself with him. A strong sense of the dignity of their relationship alone prevented his calling her on the telephone—as it doubtless had prevented her. While she remained in her father's house, he ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and Freewill, with exception of the page or two borrowed from Skelton, displays an unacquaintance with the deeper philosophy, and a helplessness in the management of the particular question, which I know not how to reconcile with the steadiness and clearness of insight evinced in the earlier Discourses. I neither ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to the United States I have been informed that the Freewill Baptist denomination have adopted the same rigid principle of slavery exclusion that characterizes the Scotch Seceders and the Quakers. Let this be known to ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... optimism, pessimism finite, infinite longitude, latitude evolution, revolution oriental, occidental pathos, bathos sacred, profane military, civil clergy, laity capital, labor ingress, egress element, compound horizontal, perpendicular competition, cooeperation predestination, freewill universal, particular extrinsic, intrinsic inflation, deflation dorsal, ventral acid, alkali synonym, antonym prologue, epilogue nadir, zenith amateur, connoisseur anterior, posterior stoic, epicure ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... ways, or if she believed the soothsayers who told her that her children would oppose her ideas? She might love them independent of their opposition, but how could she love them if she knew they were only born to do wrong? Volumes have been written on the subject of predestination and freewill, and the truth is that it is as impossible to believe in one as in the other. Nevertheless, prognostications have a knack of coming true, and if I am drowned crossing the lake you will be convinced of the truth of omens. Perhaps I ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... the Fund, that the means taken to increase it should be means exclusively fitted to lead the givers to think of their duties, not of their rights. The Sustentation Fund is not the result of a tax properly so called, but an accumulation of freewill offerings rendered to the Church by men who in this matter are responsible to God only. What the Church receives on these terms she can divide; but what the givers do not place at her disposal—what, on the contrary, they reserve for quite another purpose—she cannot lay hold of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... requires the same time to traverse the path A arrow M as for the path B arrow M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill in order to arrive at ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... God could construct triangles with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their idea of Freewill so far as to insist that God could will Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even God must submit. But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His own essential nature. The ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel (He is the God), which is in Jerusalem. 4. And whosoever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods, and with beasts, besides the freewill offering for the house of God that is in Jerusalem. 5. Then rose up the chief of the fathers of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests, and the Levites, with all them whose spirit God had raised, to go up to build the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem. 6. And all they that were about them strengthened ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the people a constitution. I am forty-eight years old, and yet I have not forgotten my youthful ideas. My generation looked forward to a united as well as to a free Germany, and hoped that unity would not come out of a war, but rather from the freewill of the German people. It is now with us through other means, but I fear not better ones. The aristocracy and the Church will assert themselves again, and the military system will lay its iron hand over the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... in accordance with the selfish calculation of the reverend fathers, the mind, deprived of all nourishment and all external support, soon began to droop and pine away in solitude. The heart seemed to beat more slowly, the soul was benumbed, the character weakened; at last, all freewill, all power of discrimination, was extinguished, and the boarders, submitting to the same process of self-annihilation as the novices of the Company, became, like them, mere "corpses" in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... population increased rapidly. Each of them delighted in the cultivation of his private "conscience"; and, in the absence of wars and oppressions, they argued one with another on points of theology, fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute. They were far from indifferent to learning, but they liked nothing quite so well as manhood and integrity. The Connecticut Yankee impressed his character on American history, and wherever in our country there has been ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... oxygen was infinitely rarefied; and this oxygen became God." For myself, my aspirations as to this system are Manichaean. The quart of oxygen is the Ormuzd, or good principle: another quart, of hydrogen, is the Ahriman, or evil principle! My author says that his system explains Freewill and Immortality so obviously that it is difficult to read previous speculations with becoming gravity. My deduction explains the conflict of good and evil with such clearness that no one can henceforward read the New Testament with ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... their way daily through the mouths of men." "Languages," he says again, "are not born like plants and trees, some naturally feeble and sickly, [162] others healthy and strong and apter to bear the weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue is generated in the world of choice and men's freewill concerning them. Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of some of our countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject with more than stoical disdain ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... in his entrance into this scene, man is now an insulation in it; he came in by no physical law, and his freewill is in utter contrast to that law. What can be more incomprehensible, more heterogeneous, a more ghostly resident in nature, than the sense of right and wrong? What is it? Whence is it? The obligation of man to sacrifice himself for right is a truth which springs out of an abyss, the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... self-willed character, threaded through and through with Calvinism. She was totally unselfish, yet totally self-centred. In the same way, she was always on a battleground between the claims of her own rampant freewill and her sanctified belief in predestination. It's not an easy ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... another idea involved in this description. The soldiers are not only marked by glad obedience, but that obedience rests upon the sacrifice of themselves. The word here rendered 'willing' is employed throughout the Levitical law for 'freewill offerings.' And if we may venture to bring that reference in here, it carries us a step farther in this characterisation of the army. This glad submission comes from self-consecration and surrender. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... they are good. Ah! poor Will Erskine![91] thou couldst and wouldst have told me. I must consult J.B., who is as honest as was W.E. But then, though he has good taste too, there is a little of Big Bow-wow about it. Can't say what made me take a frisk so uncommon of late years, as to write verses of freewill. I suppose the same impulse which makes birds sing when ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... Any new religious leader could then make his influence felt on the Western border: Dylkes, the "Leatherwood God," had found it necessary only to announce himself as the real Messiah at an Ohio campmeeting, in 1828, to build up a sect on that assumption. Freewill Baptists, Winebrennerians, Disciples, Shakers, and Universalists were urging their doctrines and confusing the minds of even the thoughtful with their conflicting views. We have seen to what beliefs the preaching of the Disciples' ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the mountains, publishing peace," disaster had befallen, and an incompetent leader had broken up the enterprise. Yet, apart from his sense of duty, there was no necessity for his remaining there. He was offering himself a freewill-offering, a living sacrifice. What could have sustained his heart and kept him firm to his purpose in such a wilderness ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Ilioneus this answer gave: "O King, blest seed of Faunus! Star nor strand Misled us, nor hath stress of storm or wave Forced us to seek the shelter of your land. Freewill hath brought us hither, forethought planned Our flight; for we are outcasts, every one, The toil-worn remnant of an exiled band, Driven from a mighty empire; mightier none In bygone years was ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... association was the operative force in the depressing and paralysing influence which I had experienced: I saw that though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances; and that what is really inspiriting and ennobling in the doctrine of freewill is the conviction that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing. All this was entirely consistent with the doctrine of circumstances, or rather, was ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill |
