These volition quotes will inspire you. Volition is the faculty or power of using one’s will.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging volition quotes, volition sayings, and volition proverbs.
Best Volition Quotes
- “That’s the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.” ~ Christopher Moore
- “One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness – that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it cannot fit into any classification and the omission of which sends all systems and theories to the devil.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “A person with half volition goes backwards and forwards, but makes no progress on even the smoothest of roads.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
-
“And this we should believe: that hope and volition can bring us closer to our ultimate goal: justice for all, injustice for no-one.” ~ Eyvind Johnson
- “Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.” ~ Gao Xingjian
- “If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “Only the human spirit can act with volition and consciously change itself; it is the only thing in all creation that is not entirely at the mercy of forces outside itself.” ~ Dean Koontz
- “We must look deeply into the nature of our volition to see whether it is pushing us in the direction of liberation from suffering and toward peace and compassion, or in the direction of affliction and misery. What is it that we really want deep in our heart? Is it money, fame, power? Or is it finding inner peace, being able to live life fully and enjoy the present moment?” ~ Nhat Hanh
-
“Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.” ~ Yann Martel
- “The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.” ~ Edward Dahlberg
- “This is one of man’s oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature’s laws?” ~ Max Planck
- “Liberty is not about class war, income war, race war, national war, a war between the sexes, or any other conflict apart from the core conflict between individuals and those who would seek power and control over the human spirit. Liberty is the dream that we can all work together, in ways of our choosing and of our own human volition, to realize a better life.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
-
“My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind.” ~ H. P. Blavatsky
- “So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.” ~ William James
- “The pure mystic wishes to approach his God only in the all-embracing love. The yogi, too, walks toward one single aspect of God. The bhakti-yogi keeps to the road of love and devotion, the raja and hatha yogi choose the path of self-control or volition, the jnana yogi will follow that of wisdom and cognition.” ~ Franz Bardon
- “The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.” ~ Charles Sanders Peirce
-
“Forgetting is something that time takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision.” ~ Simon Wiesenthal
- “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
- “The other thing I like, in fact, several months ago I introduced a bill to end the absurd catch and release policy where our government has been giving tickets, essentially, to people who enter illegally and then letting them go and show up of their own volition.” ~ John Doolittle
- “Creation,’ in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence, and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some preexisting Being.” ~ Thomas Huxley
-
“Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.” ~ John Banville
- “Freedom of Will-that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order-who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwills or under-souls-indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls-to his feelings of delight as commander.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “As far as you are concerned the present is your point of action, focus and power, and from that point of volition you form both your future and past. Realizing this, you will understand that you are not at the mercy of a past over which you have no control.” ~ Seth
- “The Marxist combination of materialism and determinism is fatally anti-humanistic. It denies a consciousness, a mind, that is independent of material conditions and class relations. It denies a will and volition that are capable of shaping the course of history. It denies an individuality that is not reducible to class. It denies both the idea and the reality of freedom, a freedom that is something more than the “bourgeois” freedom to buy and sell. It denies a morality that transcends class interests. And it denies the spirituality of man.” ~ Gertrude Himmelfarb
-
“To me, songs come of their own volition – and with an open-ended philosophy.” ~ Rufus Wainwright
- “… for our sake loosing within Himself the bonds of bodily birth, He granted us through spiritual birth, according to our own volition, power to become children of God instead of children of flesh and blood if we have faith in His Name (cf. Jn. 1:12-13). For the Savior the sequence was, first of all, incarnation and bodily birth for my sake; and so thereupon the birth in the Spirit through baptism, originally spurned by Adam, for the sake of my salvation and restoration by grace, or, to describe it even more vividly, my very remaking.” ~ Maximus the Confessor
- “Boys’ connections—to other people and to their selves—can enable them to think and act of their own volition and to resist overly restrictive norms and expectation when they are faced with pressures to conform.” ~ Judy Chu
- “I’ve always been accused by my detractors of some sort of moral failure, cowardice, or even lack of humanity by not portraying the human form. I respond that I do better by portraying traces of character and intentions of human volition that no mug or body shot can ever exude.” ~ Robert Polidori
- “David knew that the very quality of his worship was not based on his own volition but on the object of his worship – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Though our affections for God may wax and wane, His character is unchanging! We even see David speaking to his own soul, demanding of it, “Bless the Lord!”” ~ Laura Story
-
“Love itself is not an act of will, but sometimes I need the force of my volition to break with my habitual responses and pass along the love already here.” ~ Hugh Prather
- “The man of wisdom is devoid of ego even though he may appear to use it. His vacant or fasting mind is neither doing anything nor not doing anything. He is outside of volition, neither this nor that. He is everything and nothing.” ~ Ramesh S Balsekar
- “Our coherent extrapolated volition is our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted.” ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
- “There are several more careers more engaging to follow than that of poetry. But the circumstances of one’s birth, the conduct of one’s parents, the current economic structure of society, and a thousand other local factors have as much or more to say about successions to such occupations, the naive volitions of the poet to the contrary.” ~ Hart Crane
-
“Innate directs its vital energy through the nervous system to specialize the coordination and sensation and volition through the cumulative and vegetative functions.” ~ Daniel D. Palmer
- “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 Murlock Craik
- “Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and can have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.” ~ David Hume
- “” Science is beginning to encroach on every level of our volition”. And to me, that is a frightening social concept. It doesn’t have anything to do with the right to have an abortion verses the right to life. It has to do with the ability of science to keep things alive and the ability of science to really control our lives.” ~ Stephen King
-
“Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.” ~ William James
- “To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “Are you a person—with volition and maybe some stubbornness and at least the capacity if not the actual determination to do something surprising—or are you a tool? A tool just serves its user. It’s only as good as the skill of its user, and it’s not good for anything else. So if you want to accomplish something special—something more than you can do for yourself—you can’t use a tool. You have to use a person and hope the surprises will work in your favor. You have to use something that’s free to not be what you had in mind.” ~ Stephen R. Donaldson
- “What Artistic and Scientific Experience Have in Common – Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaninful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.” ~ Albert Einstein
-
“Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “”You’re a stubborn, ill-trained horse.” she said. The horse snorted and walked towards the North Road of his own volition. ”Hey!” Karigan pulled back on the reins. “Whoa. Who do you think is in charge here?”” ~ Kristen Britain
- “Unto each one hath been prescribed a preordained measure, as decreed in God’s mighty and guarded Tablets. All that which ye potentially possess can, however, be manifested only as a result of your own volition.” ~ Bahá’u’lláh
- “The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power. You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?” ~ Baron d’Holbach
-
“Anyone who has that weird volition to become an actor probably has a weird volition to do lots of other creative things – to write, to play music, to paint, to cook.” ~ Minnie Driver
- “The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space, now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill as ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious perversion of physics- as if relationships between people were susceptible to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms and molecules” ~ Douglas Adams
- “She lay down and never stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity.” ~ Elizabeth Gaskell
- “What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.” ~ William Wordsworth
-
“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.” ~ Sigmund Freud
- “In quick succession, Qhuinn reviewed his answers: No, of course not, the knife was acting of its own volition. I was actually trying to stop it…No, I only meant to give him a shave…No, I didn’t realize that slicing open someone’s jugular was going to lead to death.” ~ J.R. Ward
- “Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact – in defiance of facts. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top – the aristocracy of non-value.” ~ Ayn Rand
- “We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.” ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
-
“All athletic accomplishments begin with volition; that is, the desire and willpower necessary to succeed. Volition affects more than thoughts and feelings – it affects physical performance.” ~ Charles Garfield
- “No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars – bills you’ve saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you’ve done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.” ~ Mary Karr
- “My experience to date has been that change, particularly relative to business, rarely happens in a revolutionary way. That isn’t to say there are not times when major change happens, but my experience is that particularly when you’re encouraging businesses to change of their own volition, the change is more slow over time. I don’t think global trade is going to go away. I think it’s unlikely that global trade and multinationals are not going to be around.” ~ Jeffrey Hollender
- “The Jesuits are a MILITARY organization, not a religious order. Their chief is a general of an army, not the mere father abbot of a monastery. And the aim of this organization is power – power in its most despotic exercise – absolute power, universal power, power to control the world by the volition of a single man. Jesuitism is the most absolute of despotisms – and at the same time the greatest and most enormous of abuses.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
-
“Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live” ~ Toni Morrison
- “A man with a half volition goes backwards and forwards, and makes no way on the smoothest road; a man with a whole volition advances on the roughest, and will reach his purpose, if there be even a little worthiness in it. The man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder – a waif, a nothing, a no man. Have a purpose in life and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “We’re trying to win business by doing a good job for the clients, as opposed to, “We think being big and universal is just a great, wonderful thing.” It’s not a morality thing. It’s a “Does it work for the client?” thing. Everything we do is because a client uses us. Everything we do is because a client chose to use us of his own free volition.” ~ Jamie Dimon
- “The gist is that good and evil are foreordained. What is foreordained comes necessarily to be after a prior act of divine volition…Rather, everything small and large is written and comes to be in a known and expected measure.” ~ Blaise Pascal
-
“I’m using my own person in pieces, but I’m trying to turn my person into a nonperson in the sense of a person without will, without volition. I’m subjecting myself to a scheme.” ~ Vito Acconci
- “Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest…” ~ James Branch Cabell
- “Good and evil are essential differences of the act of the will. For good and evil pertain essentially to the will; just as truth and falsehood pertain to the reason, the act of which is distinguished essentially by the difference of truth and falsehood (according as we say that an opinion is true or false.) Consequently, good and evil volition are acts differing in species.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
