Quotes about Choice

That freedom is lost in Hell.

So nothing can be ours by right, by nature, or by necessity. But one thing is mine by my free choice: the self I give away in love. This is the thing even God cannot do for me. It really is my choice. God can love, but He cannot compel my free love. If it is compelled, it is not free. If it is free, it is not compelled.

So two things, on our part, are required to receive God's saving grace: repentance from sin and faith in God Who saves us (by grace, in Christ). Both are free choices, and both are necessary to allow grace to enter our souls.

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.

The difference between a counsel and a commandment is that a commandment implies obligation, whereas a counsel is left to the option of the one to whom it is given.

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

There is no such thing as an involuntary sin.

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.

City of God interprets all of the human story, from Creation to the Last Judgment, as the drama of divine providence and human free choice, especially the choice between the two most fundamental options of membership in one or the other of the two cities. The City of God is the invisible community of all who love God; the City of the World is all those who love the world and themselves as their God.

Even God cannot make us love him. "Forced love" is a meaningless impossibility, like "virtuous sin".

Cicero famously said, you have no choice between having a philosophy and not having one, only between having a good one and having a bad one. And not to admit that you have a philosophy at all is to have a bad one. For it is one that does not know itself. So how could it know anything else, especially us?

Second, the origin of evil is not the Creator but the creature's freely choosing sin and selfishness.