Volition Quotes
More Volition Quotes
The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.
julian jaynes— Book II, Chapter 6, p. 313
This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, innefective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.
Olaf Stapledon— Ch.III The Other Earth, 1. On the Other Earth p. 25-26
Though it is folly to suppose that happiness is a matter of volition, and that we can make ourselves content and cheerful whenever we choose a theory that many poor hypochondriacs are taunted with till they are nigh driven mad yet, on the other hand, no sane mind is ever left without the power of self-discipline and self-control in a measure, which measure increases in proportion as it is exercised.
dinah maria mulock— Ch. 10. (A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858))
Any parapsychological effect that depends upon volition, upon the subject's intent, must differ from synchronicity.
— Victor Mansfield, in Distinguishing synchronicity from the paranormal in Synchronicity, Science, and Soulmaking: Understanding Jungian Syncronicity Through Physics, Buddhism, and Philosophy (1996) p. 12
FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly , the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life . Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.
jerry fodor— p.1 (Modularity of Mind (1983))
Why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity .
— Edwin Abbott Abbott, in Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), Ch. 19 : How, Though the Sphere Showed Me Other Mysteries of Spaceland, I Still Desired More; and What Came of It
