Predestination Quotes

“It's laughable, looking back, to see the processes I went through, pretending to make a reasoned decision. No choice is ever made on the basis of logic; the logic is fabricated around the impulse, the initial desire which is innate and incontrovertible. All the time, I knew where I was going, the elements of my fulfillment or ruin were always present; I only had to work my way into that seam of desire and find the hidden vein of dross or gold. It's not a question of predestination, it's just that free will and destiny are illusions, false opposites, consolations. In the end, they are one and the same: a single process. You choose what you choose and it could not have been otherwise: the choice is destiny. It was there all along, but any alternative you might have considered is an absurd diversion, because it is in your nature to make one choice rather than another. That is identity. To speak of freedom or destiny is absurd because it suggests there is something outside yourself, directing your life, where really it is of the essence: identity, the craftwork of the soul.”
― John Burnside, The Dumb House

“A coward: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition and believes he was destined to accept it that way”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“We have control over when, how, and where to plant a seed, not over what it will become.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Will the world end in darkness because it is foretold? Or because there will be those who believe it so strongly they will make it so? In the fear that I always try to hide in my heart, I wonder if there is even a difference.”
― Patrick Ness, And the Ocean Was Our Sky

“I don't really believe that people can predict the future,' he admitted.

'People predict the future every day, Stenwold Maker,' she replied, studying the rainbow carefully as the glass panels shifted slightly on the creaking wooded framework. 'If you drop a stone, you may predict that it shall fall. If you know a man to be dishonest, you may predict that he will cheat you. If you know one army is better trained and led, you may predict that it will win the battle.'

He could not help smiling at that. 'But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.'

'And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,' she said. 'The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged by necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Salute the Dark

“I'm not certain whether I now believe in predestination or not, but that night I firmly believed in it. The proof had been striking, and regardless of the fact that I had ridiculed our forebears and their complacent astrology, I found myself thinking as they did--but I caught myself in time on this dangerous road, and having made it a rule never to reject anything categorically and never to believe in anything blindly, I cast metaphysics aside and began to watch the ground under my feet.”
― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

“Believing in unknown future, destiny, predestination without working hard to see it through is a mere fantasy”
― ETC Wanyanwu

“There was one thing, however, that I didn’t know: evil is a gift received at birth. There’s no acquiring it. Those of us who have not come to this world armed with spurs and fangs are losers in every combat.”
― Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

“I thin​k​ that both our lives and the potential directions our lives may go are predestined. By using our free will in making our life choices, we do nothing else but picking up one of many already predestined options. To us, it seems like we were making the decision, while in reality, we just selected one of many possibilities that were already a part of our destiny.”
“Don’t you think God is so powerful that he can make us believe that we made some choices, when in actuality, he had made a choice for us?”
― Stevan V. Nikolic, Truth According to Michael

“SOSTRATUS: Observe then your injustice! You punish us who are but the slaves of Clotho's bidding, and reward these, who do but minister to another's beneficence. For it will never be said that it was in our power to gainsay the irresistible ordinances of Fate?

MINOS: Ah, Sostratus; look closely enough, and you will find plenty of inconsistencies besides these. However, I see you are no common pirate, but a philosopher in your way; so much you have gained by your questions. Let him go, Hermes; he shall not be punished after that. But mind, Sostratus, you must not put it into other people's heads to ask questions of this kind.”
― Lucian of Samosata, مسامرات الأموات واستفتاء ميت

“If free will means to do what you want, then it does not exist. Many of its staunchest proponents have met the wheel of fate without opposing it”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom

“You are not what you want; you are what you have been made to be”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom

“There is great confidence in trusting God's sovereignty, especially when it comes to the fact that even Christians are willing to place their own supposed freedom and autonomy over the true freedom and autonomy of God. I have seen many precious souls struggle through these foundational issues and emerge changed, strengthened, with a new and lasting appreciation of the holiness and love of God along with a passion for His grace that cannot be erased.”
― James R. White, The Potter's Freedom: A Defense of the Reformation and a Rebuttal of Norman Geisler's Chosen But Free

“Calvin's theory of predestination has one implication which should be explicitly mentioned here, since it has found its most vigorous revival in Nazi ideology: the principle of the basic inequality of men. For Calvin there are two kinds of people—those who are saved and those who are destined to eternal damnation. Since this fate is determined before they are born and without their being able to change it by anything they do or do not do in their lives, the equality of mankind is denied in principle. Men are created unequal. This principle implies also that there is no solidarity between men, since the one factor which is the strongest basis for human solidarity is denied: the equality of man's fate. The Calvinists quite naïvely thought that they were the chosen ones and that all others were those whom God had condemned to damnation. It is obvious that this belief represented psychologically a deep contempt and hatred for other human beings—as a matter of fact, the same hatred with which they had endowed God. While modern thought has led to an increasing assertion of the equality of men, the Calvinists' principle has never been completely mute. The doctrine that men are basically unequal according to their racial background is confirmation of the same principle with a different rationalization. The psychological implications are the same.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“God has arranged all of the preceding centuries, all of the intervolutions of time, all of the events from Genesis 1:1 up to this moment - has arranged and moulded them, has had them converge in such a way that there would be a place for this hour, the hour in which His Son will be bound... He allowed neither the forces above nor the forces below to tamper with the clock of history. He directed the battles of Caesars, the conflicts of kings, the migration of peoples, the world wars, the course of stars and sun and moon, the change of epochs, and the complex movement of all things in the world in such a way that this hour would come and had to come.”
― Klass Schilder, Christ In His Suffering

“I'm not certain whether I now believe in predestination or not, but that night I firmly believed in it. The proof had been striking, and regardless of the fact that I had ridiculed our forebears and their complacent astrology, I found myself thinking as they did--but I caught myself in time on this dangerous road, and having made it a rule never to reject anything categorically and never to believe in anything blindly, I cast metaphysics aside and began to watch the ground under my feet. Such caution was timely, for I nearly stumbled over something thick and soft but apparently dead.”
― Mikhail Lermontov

“A thing does not come to pass because it has been foreknown or foretold; but it is foreknown and foretold because it is yet to come to pass.”
― James Arminius, The Works Of Jacobus Arminius Vol. 2.

“I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always ready enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“What the fates have writ, men shall not erase . . . . How many times he [Lut] had uttered those words. But what exactly did they mean? That one’s fate was inalterably fixed? A man’s entire life? Was there no chance for redemption? Though he had never revealed this to anyone, especially not the elders, he’d long entertained the notion that perhaps not all of a man’s life was preordained. For, if so, what was the point of living? Perhaps, just perhaps, he dared to imagine, impediments were placed in our paths by the gods, and a man was judged by how well he dealt with those obstacles . . . . Instead of a man being wholly defined by his fate, perhaps a man’s very character was defined by his response to the fate that was spun for him. Couldn’t it at least be possible?”
― James Jennewein

“Divine determination and decree is this: that God has foreordained all people without exception unto eternal life, for his love is unconditional.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Sometimes I do believe in predestination. I feel helpless to do anything but what I am compelled to do.”
― Why The Lucky Stiff, CLOSURE

“All has been taken Care.”
― Petra Hermans

“In capitalism economic activity, success, material gains, become ends in themselves. It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation; but as an end in itself. Man became a cog in the vast economic machine—an important one if he had much capital, an insignificant one if he had none—but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself. This readiness for submission of one’s self to extra-human ends was actually prepared by Protestantism, although nothing was further from Luther's or Calvin’s mind than the approval of such supremacy of economic activities. But in their theological teaching they had laid the ground for this development by breaking man’s spiritual backbone, his feeling of dignity and pride, by teaching him that activity had no further aims outside himself.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“The psychological significance of the doctrine of predestination is a twofold one. It expresses and enhances the feeling of individual powerlessness and insignificance. No doctrine could express more strongly than this the worthlessness of human will and effort. The decision over man's fate is taken completely out of his own hands and there is nothing man can do to change this decision. He is a powerless tool in God's hands. The other meaning of this doctrine, like that of Luther's, consists in its function to silence the irrational doubt which was the same in Calvin and his followers as in Luther. At first glance the doctrine of predestination seems to enhance the doubt rather than silence it. Must not the individual be torn by even more torturing doubts than before to learn that he was predestined either to eternal damnation or to salvation before he was born? How can he ever be sure what his lot will be? Although Calvin did not teach that there was any concrete proof of such certainty, he and his followers actually had the conviction that they belonged to the chosen ones. They got this conviction by the same mechanism of self-humiliation which we have analyzed with regard to Luther's doctrine. Having such conviction, the doctrine of predestination implied utmost certainty; one could not do anything which would endanger the state of salvation, since one's salvation did not depend on one's own actions but was decided upon before one was ever born. Again, as with Luther, the fundamental doubt resulted in the quest for absolute certainty, but though the doctrine of predestination gave such certainty, the doubt remained in the background and had to be silenced again and again by an ever-growing fanatic belief that the religious community to which one belonged represented that part of mankind which had been chosen by God.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“Bullets--to a philosopher my dear Mamma--are not worth considering. I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“But Luther did more than bring out the feeling of insignificance which already pervaded the social classes to whom he preached—he offered them a solution. By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up on every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God. Luther's relationship to God was one of complete submission. In psychological terms his concept of faith means: if you completely submit, if you accept your individual insignificance, then the all-powerful God may be willing to love you and save you. If you get rid of your individual self with all its shortcomings and doubts by utmost self-effacement, you free yourself from the feeling of your own nothingness and can participate in God's glory. Thus, while Luther freed people from the authority of the Church, he made them submit to a much more tyrannical authority, that of a God who insisted on complete submission of man and annihilation of the individual self as the essential condition to his salvation. Luther's "faith" was the conviction of being loved upon the condition of surrender, a solution which has much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the "leader.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“The centuries she had already lived had sobered her to the power of fate. There was a pervasive principle within which everything operated. As convincing as the idea of free will was, there was a constant, albeit subtle force directing events toward a particular end. She knew this intimately as she employed it almost every day: divination. Due to its complexity—as was also the case with other types of temporal magics— even she couldn't claim to know all its nuances. What she knew for sure was that there were different planes of consciousness and that the physical manifestation of the Triskai was one such realm, lying smack in the middle with some realms higher and some lower. Being so far removed from the highest plane of consciousness, people in the Triskai were always under the illusion that their thoughts and actions were made in real time when, in fact, they had already made those decisions in the higher, abstract realms. The decisions and actions simply cascaded down the tiers like a mental waterfall, presenting themselves as instantaneous deeds.”
― Asher Sharol, Bonds Of Chrome Magic

“The imagination is scarcely any better equipped to appreciate reversibility than the person who has never slept would be to appreciate dreaming. And yet we experience it in that electrocution of time we call predestination. The signs exchanged in the process are instant conductors unaffected by the resistance of time. Certain linguistic fragments run back along the path of language and collide with others in the witticism, dazzling reversibility of the terms of language. In this they fulfill an unexpected destiny, their specific destiny as words, conforming to the predestination of language.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Effort in the Calvinist doctrine had still another psychological meaning. The fact that one did not tire in that unceasing effort and that one succeeded in one's moral as well as one's secular work was a more or less distinct sign of being one of the chosen ones. The irrationality of such compulsive effort is that the activity is not meant to create a desired end but serves to indicate whether or not something will occur which has been determined beforehand, independent of one's own activity or control. This mechanism is a well-known feature of compulsive neurotics. Such persons when afraid of the outcome of an important undertaking may, while awaiting an answer, count the windows of houses or trees on the street. If the number is even, a person feels that things will be alright; if it is uneven, it is a sign that he will fail. Frequently this doubt does not refer to a specific instance but to a person's whole life, and the compulsion to look for "signs" will pervade it accordingly. Often the connection between counting stones, playing solitaire, gambling, and so on, and anxiety and doubt, is not conscious. A person may play solitaire out of a vague feeling of restlessness and only an analysis might uncover the hidden function of his activity: to reveal the future.

In Calvinism this meaning of effort was part of the religious doctrine. Originally it referred essentially to moral effort, but later on the emphasis was more and more on effort in one's occupation and on the results of this effort; that is, success or failure in business. Success became the sign of God's grace; failure, the sign of damnation.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“Predestination: a portentous, awesome word in theology, the cross of the brooding intellect, the terror of the apprehensive conscience. At first glance it appears to be a somber mystery, and seems to be the more so, the less its true supernatural and hidden character is understood. But as soon as it is moved back to the proper distance and is inspected from the right point of view, it stands before us, for all the obscurity of its secret nature, as a luminous and splendid truth. Although its ramifications are lost in dim and, to some extent, alarming regions, its shining core emits most cheering and comforting rays.”
― Matthias Joseph Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity