"Where's your will to be weird? "
— Jim Morrison

"Make sure you are doing what God wants you to do--then do it with all your strength."
— George Washington

"A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants."
— Arthur Schopenhauer

""Why should your majesty think it? My own plans are made. While I may, I sail East in Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I row East in my coracle. When that sinks, shall I paddle East with my four paws. Then, when I can swim no longer, if I have not yet reached Aslan's Country, there shall I sink with my nose to the sunrise...
and Peepiceek will be head of Talking Mice in Narnia"
— C.S. Lewis

"...someday, the realm of liberty and justice will encompass the planet. Freedom is not just the birthright of the few, it is the God-given right of all His children, in every country. It won't come by conquest. It will come, because freedom is right and freedom works. It will come, because cooperation and good will among free people will carry the day."
— Ronald Reagan (The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom)

"If we are to continue to have the freedoms that came of the inspiration of the Almighty to our Founding Fathers, we must return to the God who is their true Author."
— Gordon B. Hinckley (Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes)

"Was this a betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect."
— Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law/Liber Al Vel Legis)

"They were careless people -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

""That is not dead which can eternal lie, yet with stranger eons, even death may die""
— H.P LoveCraft

"Dr. Jules Hilbert: Hell Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted.

Harold Crick: What is wrong with you? Hey, I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?

Dr. Jules Hilbert: Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes. "
— Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction: The Shooting Script)

"Faith is not Desire. Faith is Will. Desires are things that need to be satisfied, whereas Will is a force. Will changes the space around us,..."
— Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

"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."
— Frank Herbert

"It is true of course, that I have a will of iron, but it can be switched off if the circumstances seem to demand it."
— P.G. Wodehouse (Jeeves in the Morning)

"Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security. "
— Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead)

"Die Freiheit des Menschen liegt nicht darin, dass er tun kann, was er will, sondern dass er nicht tun muss, was er nicht will."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"My boy's wicked smart."
— casey affleck's character in 'good will hunting'

"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."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems."
— Will Eisner

""Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I."
— Herman Melville (Moby Dick)

"The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices."
— Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.)

"Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans."
— George MacDonald

"At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity; the human will as will, and not just a surge of hormones; the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding. We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities -- they are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of. But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed fragments, but as wholes made real by our contemplation of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes."
— Melvin Konner

"But then he thought about his Dad, who soon he'd have to face.
"Get up." an echo sounded low. "Get up and take your place. You were not meant for failure here, get up and win the race."
With borrowed will, "Get up," it said, "You haven't lost at all. For winning is no more than this - to rise each time you fall.""
— The Standard of Performance No. 32

"When you've been tossed and driven like the mighty rushing wind; hold on to you sense of dignity, in the end you will be the one that comes out on the top."
— Barbara Hart

"If we would completely rejoice the heart of God, let us strive in all things to conform ourselves to His divine will. Let us not only strive to conform ourselves, but also to unite ourselves to whatever dispositions God makes of us.
Conformity signifies that we join our wills to the will of God. Uniformity means more. Uniformity means that we make one will of God's will and our will. In this way we will only what God wills. God's will alone is our will. "
— Alphonsus De Ligouri

"The Mayor spoke proudly. 'Yes, they will light it. I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir, but—I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brae man will have made them a little braver.' He smiled apologetically. 'You see, it is an easy thing to do, since the end for me is the same.'

Lanser said, "If you say yes, we can tell them you said no. We can tell them you begged for your life.'

And Winter broke in angrily, 'They would know. You do not keep secrets. One of your men got out of hand one night and he said the flies had conquered the flypaper, and now the whole nation knows his words. They have made a song of it. The flies have conquered the flypaper. You do not keep secrets, Colonel.'"
— John Steinbeck (The Moon Is Down)

"Alle Dinge müssen, der Mensch allein ist das Wesen, welches will."
— Meister Eckhart

"Da man nicht tun kann, was man will, muss man das wollen, was man tun kann."
— Terence

""I've been wondering about this free will shit. Why we keep doing the same dance long after we figure out it's not that fun anymore. So we keep shuffling our feet, dancing that same dance over and over again and we keep getting the same result. It ain't the tune, we know that. It's just real hard to admit that when the music stops, it's all on us.""
— The cleaner

""That was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever had to learn about anything. That she is her own, and what she gives me is her choosing and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come sit on your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or another, it and it's choice to be there are gone. "
"
— Ann

"The death of Thomas had shown that, in a conflict between the Church and the Crown, the monarch could always prevail by the use of brute force. But the cult of Saint Thomas proved that such a victory would always be a hollow one. The power of a king was not absolute, after all: it could be restrained by the will of the people (972)."
— Ken Follett (The Pillars of the Earth)

"Stupid to speak of blame when the wills of the immortals are involved."
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Chosen)

"We become that which we love."
— Saint Bridget

"Macht ist nur die leere Erhöhung des eigenen Willens über den Willen anderer."
— Mario Puzo

""Love is like a reptile, you cut off its tail and it grows another one." Kiss Me Judas

"
— Will Christopher Baer

"I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could surprise himself, could surprise me, by being such a person too. Would he let himself do such a thing? I didn’t think so. And then I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?
I tried to call up the moment when I had decided I could be such a person. It seemed to me I hadn’t quite got there, not really. That I was still just playing with the idea of it when the ground shifted under me. But perhaps to play with such an idea was already to be a certain kind of person.
"
— Sue Miller (While I Was Gone)

"Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength--life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

"God loves to pour out His Spirit with power on those who will dare to align radically their purposes with His."
— Steve Childers

"I am Thy servant to do Thy will, and that will is sweeter to me than position or riches or fame, and I choose it above all things on Earth or in Heaven."
— A.W. Tozer

"I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!"
— Meister Eckhart