Will (philosophy)

“Will localizes us; thought universalizes us.”

“A willing heart adds feather to the heel,And makes the clown a winged Mercury.”

“He that will not when he may,When he will he shall have nay.”

“He that complies against his will,For reasons to himself best known.”

“Pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”

“When a man says he's willin'," said Mr. Barkis, "it's as much as to say, that man's a-waitin' for a answer.”

“The readinesse of doing doth expresseNo other but the doer's willingnesse.”

“I have known many who could not when they would, for they had not done it when they could.”

“My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears,Of will and judgment.”

“That what he will he does, and does so muchThat proof is call'd impossibility.”

“"Akrasia" [weakness of will] in rational beings is as common as wine in France.”

“Our wills are ours, we know not how;Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”

“For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God.”

“Most of the time man does not do what he wills, but what he has willed. Through his decisions, he always gives himself only a certain direction, in which he then moves until the next moment of reflection. We do not will continuously, we only will intermittently, piece by piece. We thus save ourselves from willing: principle of the economy of the will. But the higher man always experiences this as thoroughly immoral.”

“There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism.”

“The commander of the forces of a large State may be carried off, but the will of even a common man cannot be taken from him.”

“There is nothing good or evil save in the will.”

“To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.”

“The only way of setting the will free is to deliver it from wilfulness.”

“All theory is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it.”

“The star of the unconquered will,And calm, and self-possessed.”

“A boy's will is the wind's will.”

“Will without power is like children playing at soldiers.”

“And binding nature fast in fate,Left free the human will.”

“We sought therefore to amend our will, and not to suffer it through despite to languish long time in error.”

“AllLife needs for life is possible to will.”

“We lay it down as a first principle — from which we can no more depart than from the consciousness of existence — that man is free; and therefore stand ready to embrace whatever is fairly included in the definition of freedom.”

“There may be some tenderness in the conscience and yet the will be a very stone; and as long as the will stands out, there is no broken heart.”

“The true servants of God are not solicitous that He should order them to do what they desire to do, but that they may desire to do what He orders them to do.”

“Renew my will from day to day,"Thy will be done."”

“Do not let the loud utterances of your own wills anticipate, nor drown, the still, small voice in which God speaks. Bridle impatience till He does. If you cannot hear His whisper, wait till you do. Take care of running before you are sent. Keep your wills in equipoise till God's hand gives the impulse and direction.”

“What men want is not talent, it is purpose; in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labor. I believe that labor judiciously and continuously applied becomes genius. You cannot will to possess the spirit of Christ, that must come as His gift; but you can choose to study His life, and to imitate it.”

“My will, not Thine be done, turned Paradise into a desert. "Thy will, not mine be done," turned the desert into Paradise, and made Gethsemane the gate of heaven.”

“Want of will causes paralysis of every faculty. In spiritual things man is utterly unable because resolvedly unwilling.”