Quotes about Will

Because the will renewed is the Lord's work, it is wrongly attributed to man that he obeys prevenient grace with his will as attendant.

It is our job to listen to God and let Him tell us what is going on and what we are to do about it - leaving the rest to Him to work out according to His knowledge and will, not ours.

Free agency, given us through the plan of our Father, is the great alternative to Satan's plan of force. With this sublime gift, we can grow, improve, progress, and seek perfection.

The only way God can strengthen his presence in our will is to weaken his presence in our feelings. Otherwise we would become spiritual cripples, unable to walk without emotional crutches. This is why he gives us dryness, sufferings, and failures.

Man's soul has three powers, and God left him prophets for all three: Jewish moralists for his will, Greek philosophers for his mind, and pagan mythmakers for his heart and imagination and feelings. Of course, the latter two are not infallible.

Three reasons God commands us to pray correlate to our three deepest needs, the fundamental needs of the three powers of our soul: prayer gives truth to our mind, goodness to our will, and beauty to our heart . 'The true, the good, and the beautiful' are the three things we need and love the most, because they are the three attributes of God.

when the soul no longer conforms to the will of God, the body no longer conforms to the will of the soul.

But we can influence (not compel) each other's choices through the mediating channels of imagination and emotion. So can angels. They can't put judgments in your mind or choices in your will, but they can put images in your imagination and feelings in your heart. (Feelings don't compel you either; your will can choose whether to follow your feelings or not.)

Therefore if we lack the feeling of repentance but nevertheless want to repent; if we choose repentance with the will; we are then repenting, since repentance is that choice of the will.

What is voluntary comes from the will; what is forced comes to the will from outside and prevents it from doing what it will.

The good Jew, like the good Christian, sees behind the law to the Lawgiver, whose will is perfect love.

the will can obey the passions instead of the reason, and this accounts for the fact that we often know what is good and what is evil—even what is good for us, what is truly best for us, for our own ultimate happiness—and yet choose evil over good, choose what we know is not in our own best interests. We can choose misery over joy if our will, led by our passions, commands our mind to focus on the short-range pleasures and ignore the long-run miseries.