Wills Quotes
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The core of common culture is religion. Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.
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More Wills Quotes
The One Unbounded, Undivided Good,By all His Creatures partly understood.If therefore Sense of its apparent PartsRaise not His Love or Worship in our Hearts,Our selfish Wills or Notions we may feast,And have no more Religion than a Beast.
john byrom— St. 5.
Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature Wills.
— IX, 3. (Book IX)
Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he Wills, Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment is but his looking-glass.
james allen— Variant: Mind is the Master Power that molds and makes, And we are mind. And ever more we take the tool of thought, and shaping what we will, bring forth a thousand joys, or a thousand ills. We think in secret, and it comes to pass, environment, is but our looking glass.
In the life of nations, what in the last resort decides questions is a kind of Judgment Court of God... Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he Wills.
Adolf Hitler— speech in Munich, 13 April 1923
Custom calls me to 't: What custom Wills, in all things should we do't, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heap't For truth to o'erpeer.
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (c. 1607-08), Act II, scene 3, line 124.
In spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he Wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible:;– no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other:;– no, that he will not do for all the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself:;– with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be.
— Søren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death (1849) published using the pseudonym "Anti-Climacus"
Yet when I approach 584 Her loveliness, so absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she Wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best.
john milton— 1665 Adam speaking of Eve. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.8, l.546-50.
In hell, sinners shall forever lay all the blame on their own Wills. Hell is a rational torment by conscience.
Richard Baxter— The Saints' Everlasting Rest (1650), "The People Who Receive the Saints' Rest"
The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God Wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure.
françois fénelon— P. 269. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach Wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.
jerome k. jerome— Ch. 10 (Three Men in a Boat (1889))
Progress toward a more abundant material life does not come like manna from heaven, however. My message certainly is not one of complacency. The ultimate resource is people — especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty — who will exert their Wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well.
julian simon— "The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving," Cato Institute Policy Report, September/October 1995 [3]
Every man is free to do that which he Wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.
Herbert Spencer— Ch. 6, The Formula of Justice.
Every person, if he so Wills, can become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing of his accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them. He ennobles them by choosing them.
— Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, Hong p. 262.
Our Wills are ours, we know not how;Our Wills are ours, to make them thine.
— Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849), Introduction, Stanza 4.
Pure community is a matter of no interest to any will; but a community which pursues a common good is of supreme interest to all Wills; and what we have here said is that whatever the nature of that common good ... it must contain the development of individual powers, as a prior condition for all other goods.
william ernest hocking— Ch. VII, Natural Right, § 35, p. 77
If we are only as the potter's clay Made to be fashioned as the artist Wills, And broken into shards if we offend The eye of Him who made us, it is well.
— Rights; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The Wheel weaves as the Wheel Wills, and we are only the thread of the Pattern.
robert jordan— Moiraine Damodred
What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God Wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.
— Journal entry, Gilleleie (1 August 1835) Journals 1A; this is considered to be one of the earliest statements of existentialist thought.Variant translation: My focus should be on what I do in life, not knowing everything, excluding knowledge on what you do. The is key to find a purpose, whatever it truly is that God wills me to do; it's crucial to find a truth which is true to me, to find the idea which I am willing to live and die for.Later variant: What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.Later expression of such thoughts in a letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund (31 August 1835)Variant translation: I must find a truth that is true for me.
The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God Wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure.
— François Fénelon, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers P. 269. (1895)
Our Wills are ours, we know not how; Our Wills are ours, to make them thine.
— Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849), Introduction, Stanza 4.
Let's choose executors and talk of Wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act III, scene 2, line 148.
Let's choose executors and talk of Wills: And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
william shakespeare— William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act III, scene 2, line 148.
The law has ever been watchful and jealous of Wills made under religious influences, and especially so when those influences connect themselves with any individual who is the object of the testator's bounty.
— Sir J. P. Wilde, Smith v. Tebbitt (1867), L. R. 1 Pr. & D. 437.
I regret exceedingly that, not only ordinary laymen, but, as it seems to me, professional men, do not understand the great difficulty there is in drawing Wills, and do not bestow a little more care and pains in endeavouring to draw them in such a way as that the numerous questions which often arise on them should be avoided. I regret to say that these questions often throw a great deal of expense on parties interested under the Wills, and are the cause of great heartburnings and most bitter animosities.
— Pearson, J., In re Wait; Workman v. Petgrave (1885), L. R. 30 C. D. 622.
I quite admit that on the question of the construction of Wills relating to real property the cases have always had greater attention given to them than in the case of personalty, because land in England passes by title, and it has always been the habit of the lawyers and Judges to look with greater strictness to the reported cases where it is a question of land than where it is a question of personalty.
— Chitty, J., In re Bright-Smith; Bright-Smith v. Bright-Smith (1886), L. R. 31 CD. 318.
Do not be troubled by St. Bernard's saying that "Hell is full of good intentions and Wills."
— Francis de Sales, letter to Madame de Chantal. (1605). Letter XII, p. 70. Selections from the Spiritual Letters of S. Francis de Sales. Translation by the author of "A Dominican Artist." Letter LXXIV in Blaise ed. Quoted also in Letter XXII, Book II. of Leonard's ed. (1726). Collet's La Vraie et Solide Piété, Part I, Chapter LXXV.
As the flowers follow the sun, and silently hold up their petals to be tinted and enlarged by its shining, so must we, if we would know the joy of God, hold our souls, Wills, hearts, and minds, still before Him, whose voice commands, whose love warns, whose truth makes fair our whole being.' God speaks for the most part in such silence only. If the soul be full of tumult and jangling voices, His voice is little likely to be heard.
— Alexander Maclaren, p. 559. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
What disturbs us in this world is not " trouble," but our opposition to trouble. The true source of all that frets and irritates and wears away our lives, is not in external things, but in the resistance of our Wills to the will of God expressed by external things.
— Alexander Maclaren, p. 588. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Only be steadfast, never waver, Nor seek earth's favor, But rest; Thou knowest what God Wills must be For all His creatures so for thee The best.
— Paul Fleming, p. 248. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
