31 quotes found
“if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like”
“There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn't even terrible; it's possibly funny, if even that. It's embarrassing. That's all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer cont...”
“thinking about tracking. . . . Sometime in grade school, already your fate was settled, your socialclass was established for the rest of your life.”
“The future is just a projection of the past.”
“Whether or not it is clear to you,no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”
“This is one of man's oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature's ...”
“Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny that of the hunted.”
“He did it because he could not help himself, which explains everything and nothing”
“I've been coerced into free will.”
“The concept of Free Will makes no sense unless associated, somehow or the other, with Absolute Determinism; it is just as a man cannot walk without gravity arresting and spurring his pace simultane...”
“Predictability is not how things will go, but how they can go.”
“Sometimes evil didn't need an excuse. Sometimes evil just was.”
“You is not you until you see the path of your faith.”
“Events fall into a pattern that we can only discern retrospectively. We credit ourselves with far more agency than we actually possess. Things happen because they happen.”
“...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability...”
“What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”
“You don't choose to choose what you choose in life!”
“[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.”
“If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, becau...”
“In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined b...”