Here's a selection of a few "free-will" quotes from my collection:
see also this thread on predestination .....
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1602&start=15
"The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD; / he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases”
- Proverbs 21:1
“The lot s cast into the lap, / but its every decision is from the LORD”
- Proverbs 16:33
“Each one of you now, according to the Law of Cause and Effect, is in the place the Total Wisdom has placed you. You are not there by chance. You are obeying the Divine Plan placed in the circumstances, family, community and nation necessary to learn your next lessons. In general, what are these lessons? To be patient -To be tolerant - To love. To love even those who stand against you."
- Daskalos
"There will come a day when you will feel totally helpless, a mere pawn of destiny, and then you will begin to realize that God alone is your haven of security."
- Paramhansa Yogananda
Free will is the function of the Master within us. Our will is the supremacy of one desire over another.
- George Gurdjieff: [1]
Man does have limited free will; he can decide whether or not to surrender to the will of Krishna. All other material happenings and their implications are inconceivably predestined.
- Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
God Chooses: Hear what Christ says: "you have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you" (John 15:16). No one can choose to follow Christ, unless Christ has chosen them. Yet Christ only does the will of his Father (John 6:38). Christ chooses what his Father chose for him. Is this confirmed anywhere else in the Bible? "No man can come to me, except the Father which has sent me draw him" (John 6:44).
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http://www.becomingone.org/
THEOLOGY defines predestination as the regulation of all souls to either salvation or damnation. Did God predestine or predetermine for all of mankind to be cast into hell and eternal damnation? Absolutely NOT! Did God predestinate a certain number of mankind to be lost and cast into hell and eternal damnation? Again Absolutely NOT!" ......... You alone choose one of two predetermined destinations. In other words you choose your predestination. That is to say you predestine yourself, so to speak, by the FINAL choice you make."
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http://www.amatteroftruth.com/predestnation
"It would be interesting to look at whether either GOD or the Individual decides if one is to be saved. For example, in Calvinism, God chooses which individual is to be saved or not saved; in Arminianism, the believer is the one who does or does not choose to be saved by God"
- Source
"Every morning three million "free wills" flowed toward the center of the New York megapolis; every evening they flowed out again -- all by "free will," and on a smooth and predictable curve."
(from "The Year of the Jackpot")
"Therefore we see at once that there cannot be any such thing as free-will; the very words are a contradiction, because will is what we know, and everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by conditions of time, space and causality. ... To acquire freedom we have to get beyond the limitations of this universe; it cannot be found here". [77] - A quotation from Swami Vivekananda, a Vedantist, offers a good example of the worry about free will in the Hindu tradition.
In Buddhism it is taught that the idea of absolute freedom of choice (i.e. that any human being could be completely free to make any choice) is foolish, because it denies the reality of one's physical needs and circumstances. Equally incorrect is the idea that we have no choice in life or that our lives are pre-determined. To deny freedom would be to deny the efforts of Buddhists to make moral progress (through our capacity to freely choose compassionate action). Pubbekatahetuvada, the belief that all happiness and suffering arise from previous actions, is considered a wrong view according to Buddhist doctrines. Because Buddhists also reject agenthood, the traditional compatibilist strategies are closed to them as well. Instead, the Buddhist philosophical strategy is to examine the metaphysics of causality. Ancient India had many heated arguments about the nature of causality with Jains, Nyayists, Samkhyists, Cārvākans, and Buddhists all taking slightly different lines. In many ways, the Buddhist position is closer to a theory of "conditionality" than a theory of "causality", especially as it is expounded by Nagarjuna in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.[78]
- Wiki
This problem (illusion) is compounded by the fact that man thinks that he has
self-consciousness and thinks that he has volition (i.e., man unconsciously
assumes that his will is unconditioned). Man does of course have and exercises
free will, but that free will is almost entirely conditioned by karma (karmic
circumstances) (internal and external factors (forces)). Man does learn, grow,
and evolve in consciousness as a result of his (mechanical) experience, but there
is (for the vast majority of humanity) no real awareness of either oneself or the
reality of life.
And virtually all of the people involved in metaphysics (theosophy) (the
spiritual path) are not really any different than ordinary humanity except in the
sense of (potentially) having a better knowledge and understanding of the
nature of things and in the sense of (potentially) being better qualified in
consciousness, but unless that knowledge and (intellectual) understanding (and
qualification) is translated into real awareness, then the philosophical, religious,
and spiritual students of the world are just as asleep in their mechanicalness as
are the non-philosophical, non-religious, non-spiritual students.
- (source: upper triad book10)
"A perfect nature has no need of choice, for it knows naturally what is good...our free choice indicates the imperfection (emphasis mine) of fallen human nature, the loss of divine likeness. Our nature being over-clouded by sin no longer knows its true good, and usually turns to what is 'against nature'; and so the human person is always faced with the necessity of choice; it goes forward gropingly. This hesitation in our ascent towards the good we call 'free will'. "
- from The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p.125
"Everything that lives must serve the “all-universal purposes.” Man is not exempt from this necessity, and must, either by his life or by this death, contribute his quota to the transformation of energy upon which the reciprocal maintenance of all existence depends" "Man has thus a two-fold destiny, either to live only as the unconscious slave of the all-universal purpose, or to pay the debt of his own existence and thus attain independent individuality, with all that this brings of further possibilities of self-perfecting."
"A man is a very complex organism developed by evolution from the simplest organisms, and who has now become capable of reacting in a very complex manner to external impressions. This capability of reacting in man is so complex, and the responsive movements can appear to be so far removed from the causes evoking them and conditioning them, that the actions of man, or at least a part of them, seem to naive observation quite spontaneous. The average man is indeed incapable of the single smallest independent or spontaneous action or word. All of him is only the result of external effect. Man is a transforming machine, a kind of transmitting station of forces. Man differs from the animals only by the greater complexity of his reactions to external impressions, and by having a more complex construction for perceiving and reacting to them."
- George Gurdjieff
