Willful Quotes

Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares nothing for truth, who rebels against personal discipline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of self-education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see himself as he is. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

The moral complexity of the situation had grown past his ability to process it, so he just relaxed in the warm glow of victory instead. ~ James S.A. Corey

Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy. ~ Holly Lisle

If it's a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them. ~ Paul Murray

But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more. ~ David Bentley Hart

The willful amnesia afflicting the sciences in general contrasts sharply with the importance given to memory by the humanities. Literature, philosophy, politics, and the visual arts, including photography and filmmaking, feed on memory. Practitioners of the humanities need memory to deepen and refine their thinking. ~ James Hillman

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed. ~ Anne Rice

It is a well-worn saying but one nonetheless true and nonetheless worthy of repetition, inasmuch as it expresses peculiarly the situation now widely prevalent, that "where there is no vision the people perish. " Mankind as a whole, or more particularly the Western element, has lost in some incomprehensible way its spiritual vision. An heretical barrier has been erected separating itself from that current of life and vitality which even now, despite willful impediment and obstacle, pulses and vibrates passionately in the blood, pervading the whole of universal form and structure. The anomalies presented today are due to this rank absurdity. Mankind is slowly accomplishing its own suicide. A self-strangulation is being effected through a suppression of all individuality, in the spiritual sense, and all that made it human. It continues to withhold the spiritual atmosphere from its lungs, so to speak. And having severed itself from the eternal and never-ceasing sources of light and life and inspiration, it has deliberately blinded itself to the fact - than which no other could compare in importance - that there is a dynamic principle both within and without from which it has accomplished a divorce. The result is inner lethargy, chaos, and the disintegration of all that formerly was held to be ideal and sacred. ~ Israel Regardie

Freedom is never easy to keep and can easily be lost. All it takes is willful indifference. ~ Terry Goodkind

I'm extremely willful to win, and I respond to challenges. Scoring titles and stuff like that ... it sounds, well, I don't care how it sounds - to me, scoring comes easy. It's not a challenge to me to win the scoring title, because I know I can. ~ Kobe Bryant

The more you can escape from how horrible things really are, the less it's going to bother you ... and then, the worse things get. ~ Frank Zappa

You understand, don't you, Mrs. Mackenzie?" Blackwell murmured, his hard mouth barely moving as the intensity of his regard pinned her to her seat. "The deeds of a willful youth."
A thrill of danger kissed her spine.
"Horseshit!" Morley roared.
Dorian turned back to face him, and Farah was able to let out a breath she hadn't been aware she'd been holding as the black spell he'd woven over her suddenly dissipated.
"For shame, Morley," he mockingly chided. "Such language in front of a lady."
"She is my employee," Sir Morley gritted through clenched teeth. "And I'll thank you not to bother about her if you want to keep the vision in the eye you have left."
"I can hardly help myself. She's such a ripe piece of skirt. ~ Kerrigan Byrne

Because I do not wish to know," he says. "I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark. ~ Erin Morgenstern

I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and - if you're not careful - those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book. ~ Brandon Sanderson

The power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is. As such, I've never bought into the idea that the writer requires any special ritual in order to write. If need be, I could write almost anywhere, as easily in an ashram as in a crowded cafe, or so I've always insisted when asked whether I write with a pen or a computer, at morning or night, alone or surrounded, in a saddle like Goethe, standing like Hemingway, lying down like Twain, and so on, as if there were a secret to it all that might spring the lock of the safe housing the novel, fully formed and ready for publication, apparently suspended in each of us. ~ Nicole Krauss

For love is a willful stirring of our thoughts unto God, so that it receive nothing that is against the love of Jesus Christ, and therewith that it be lasting in sweetness of devotion; and that is the perfection of this life. ~ Richard Rolle

This place of stuck - "I have to" and "I can't" - feels familiar from my spiritual work. We're told to simply "let go" - but when we try to do this, we often seem to get more deeply tangled in the willful web of resistance. In spite of injunctions to the contrary, "letting go" doesn't appear to be something we have conscious control over. Why can't we just let go into the loving arms of the universe? What is this holding back that seems so essential - so imperative? ~ David Rynick

Bill O'Reilly calls his tv show the "No Spin Zone" but the man is practically a whirling dervish. He combines willful ignorance with a simple child-like faith in the system that, not coincidentally, has made him a millionaire. ~ Earl Lee

Perhaps we have failed as human beings. Perhaps we have embarrassed ourselves to the natural world. We have been rigorous and willful in all the wrong ways. But it doesn't have to be this way. Maybe you don't want to deal with (marching), the permanent marker and poster board. But try something else. Carry someone's groceries. Chat with the custodian in your office building. Donate blood. Live in Rwanda for a year. Write letters to the Department of Buildings. Learn to knit. It is only going to get better from here on out. ~ Sufjan Stevens

Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse. ~ Carl Jung

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. ~ John Steinbeck

...only the one who knows and practices the iconoclastic fury of destruction can possess the joy born of freedom, of that unique freedom fertilized by sorrow. I rise up against the reality of the outer world for the triumph of the reality of my inner world. I reject society for the triumph of the I. I reject the stability of every rule, every custom, every morality, for the affirmation of every willful instinct, all free emotionality, every passion and every fantasy. I mock at every duty and every right so I can sing free will. I scorn the future to suffer and enjoy my good and my bad in the present. I despise humanity because it is not my humanity. I hate tyrants and I detest slaves. I don't want and I don't grant solidarity, because I am convinced that it is a new chain, and because I believe with Ibsen that the one who is most alone is the strongest one. This is my Nihilism. ~ Renzo Novatore

You have not had any privacy since the first day you owned your first cell phone. They can track everything. They can hear recordings of anything you have ever said on your cell. And read everything you ever read, and everything you ever typed. And see every location you've ever been to. That's just how cells work. Your privacy is a willful illusion. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

You will cease risking your reputation, Calpurnia, at least until Juliana is out. That means no unchaperoned visits to London public houses. Strike that. No visits to London public houses whatsoever. And, if you could see to it that you avoid leaving the house in the dead of night, that would be excellent."
"Certainly, my lord." Callie turned willful, her courage bolstered by drink. "And how would you suggest I prevent men from inappropriately accosting me in my ancestral home? ~ Sarah MacLean

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. ~ Richard Dawkins

The human being is a self-propelled automaton entirely under the control of external influences. Willful and predetermined though they appear, his actions are governed not from within, but from without. He is like a float tossed about by the waves of a turbulent sea. ~ Nikola Tesla

This is why she hates Alabaster: not because he is more powerful, not even because he is crazy, but because he refuses to allow her any of the polite fictions and unspoken truths that have kept her comfortable, and safe, for years. ~ N.K. Jemisin

While many people like the idea of exercising unconditional love, most eventually find it too draining and impossible to sustain, often because the attempt to practice it is misunderstood, discouraged, brought under attack, or made a target of willful abuse. As sad as it may be to admit, in our modern world people are far more accustomed to hearing news of war, genocide, murder, disasters, famine, and disease than they are to hearing anything about acts of love or grace. ~ Aberjhani

Rebels depend on willful gullibility. ~ Dan Jones

Authorities this broad give the national security bureaucracy the power to scrutinize the personal lives of every law-abiding American. Allowing that to continue is a grave error that demonstrates a willful ignorance of human nature. Moreover, it demonstrates a complete disregard for the responsibilities entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers to maintain robust checks and balances on the power of any arm of the government. That obviously raises some very serious questions. What happens to our government, our civil liberties and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked? As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority. Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government. ~ Ron Wyden

When something is "all in your mind," people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes. ~ Temple Grandin

Sometimes we find ourselves walking through life blindfolded, and we try to deny that we're the ones who securely tied the knot. ~ Jodi Picoult

Gradually, however, she revealed a frustration with the willful ignorance that is an abiding human trait, an indignation at the cruelty that people visit upon one another. She might see the world as hopeless, but she believed it did not have to remain that way. ~ Dean Koontz

An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it. ~ James A. Michener

We know what willpower is, but by some misguided conception, many of us believe we have to be a certain type of person, strong, determined, extroverted, to be able to be willful, to exercise willpower. Not so. We all have it and just don't know how to use it. ~ Rosemary Altea

In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss. ~ Jared Diamond

When and if Violet ever fell in love, lightning would split the heavens, tectonic plates would shift, continents would reorder themselves.
Because she might be willful and spoiled and impetuous, but no one loved with the force of his sister. Her love story would be epic. ~ Julie Anne Long

Lies bewitch us, if we want to be bewitched. ~ Marty Rubin

There is a dangerous willful ignorance in governments to the adverse health effects of the various forms of electromagnetic radiation. ~ Steven Magee

He didn't believe that, surely." "Of course not! But he had to pretend he did, as otherwise he would have had no choice but to be insulted. And since there would be nothing he could do about that, being insulted would only lead to humiliation. And since he didn't want that, the simplest path to follow was to believe what I said. ~ Isaac Asimov

People see what they want to see. ~ John Green

Red Riding Hood screamed, not out of alarm at the wolf's apparent tendency toward cross-dressing, but because of his willful invasion of her personal space. ~ James Finn Garner

Taken to extremes, life is a process of reorientation after shame or glory and when anxiety sweeps in there is a relief at not having left any definite tracks.

Before you understand where the emotion is going to lead, you talk to anyone and everyone about the object of your love. All of a sudden, this stops. By then the ice is already thin and slippery. You realize that every word could expose your infatuation. Feigning indifference is as hard as acting normally and fundamentally the same thing.

There is a resistance in the party who wants to leave, a fear of the unknown, of the hassle and of changing one's mind. A party not wanting to be left must exploit that resistance. But then they must restrain their need for clarity and honesty. The matter must remain unformulated. A party not wanting to be left must leave it to the one wanting to go to express the change. That is the only way to keep a person who does not want to be with you. Hence the widespread silence in the relationships of the world.

Love needs no words. For a short period you can put your trust in wordless emotion. But in the long run there is no love without words and no love with words alone. Love is a hungry beast. It feeds off touch and repeated assurances.

The sense of desolation in a flat that your lover has just left is the most complete sense of desolation that exists.

Her desperation being real, she was extra-sensitive to the ways desperation could ~ Lena Andersson

Of all mankind's unpleasant habits, sheer and willful cruelty is the most base, the least forgivable and, when carried to its extreme, perhaps the most horrific. ~ Christopher Riche Evans

One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised. Betrayal, though ... betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope. ~ Steven Dietz

All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she's been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she's been hot on its trail, and now that she's got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato. ~ Susan Choi

For me, the greatest source of frustration was trying to work with a willful child when there was something else I wanted - say, to get the child to go to bed so I could have my own time. Just the promise of the time, and feeling that promise slip away, was enough to introduce a whole other element of stress into the encounter. ~ Carolyn Hax

Informed optimism is different from a willful ignorance that simply wishes not to see the bad in the world. Seeing the truth and choosing every day to see it, letting life break your heart but doing something about it took courage. It was not about hiding your head in the sand but rather digging in, accepting the challenges, and doing the hard work it takes not just to complain about a problem but to be the solution. ~ Jewel

Maybe Violet was stricken with colorblindness, the willful inability to distinguish between white and any other color, the only infirmity Americans wished for themselves. But ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

It disturbs me mostly ... is the willful, deliberate denial (by the FDA, of) our own citizens, a fair chance to use Laetrile, when all the record (shows) it is not toxic, ... is safe, ... and is effective. ~ Luther L. Bohanon

I have always been willful and stubborn. It is one of my greatest sins."

"But is it a sin? If it allows you to survive? Endure? Prevail? ~ Robin LaFevers

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance. ~ Milan Kundera

Willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement. No man, no woman, can shirk the primary duties of life, whether for love of ease and pleasure, or for any other cause, and retain his or her self-respect. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Gigantic, willful, young, Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates. ~ William Vaughn Moody

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters. ~ Iain Pears

Courage is willful hope. ~ Joanna Russ

Since then her life had been peaceful and happy. She had allowed herself to be worshipped by that strangely captivating lover of hers, whose passionately willful temperament, tempered by that persistent, sunny gaiety, she had up to now only half understood. ~ Emmuska Orczy

It never pleases me to punish willful disobedience, Isabel. Having to punish you for that sort of thing means I've failed to communicate what it is I expect out of you. It means I'm failing you as a Dom if you don't understand what my wants and needs are, and I hate failing at anything. ~ Ella Dominguez

There are a lot of Ellroy lifts, man. This guy went to school. But then there's a willful thing that comes over me - God gives it to me - where I go, "That's real nice, let's just go home, pat yourself on the back, good dog, good dog, and wake up in the morning and go to work." ~ James Ellroy

Where resides the comforting knowledge of history's vast, cyclical sweep, the ebb and flow of wars and peace? Peace is the time of waiting for war. A time of preparation, or a time of willful ignorance, blind, blinkered and prattling behind secure walls. ~ Steven Erikson

There are a sort of men, whose visages
Do cream and mantle, like a standing pond;
And do a willful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dressed in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity profound conceit;
As who should say, I am sir Oracle,
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark! ~ William Shakespeare

Money gained on Sabbath-day is a loss, I dare to say. No blessing can come with that which comes to us, on the devil's back, by our willful disobedience of God's law. The loss of health by neglect of rest, and the loss of soul by neglect of hearing the gospel, soon turn all seeming profit into real loss. ~ Charles Spurgeon

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own pwer in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was sadi to have been quite dramatic. A painteding the scned survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormaous atlases soaring around the place like condors.
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear o the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly dposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub - sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribably papery susurrus. ~ Lev Grossman

When Mantle faced the cameras for the last time a month before his death, he was a husk of a man, shrunken by cancer. The stiff brim of his 1995 All-Star Game cap dwarfed his brow. There was no Mantle Roll. He looked straight into the cameras and told us all, 'Don't be like me.'

The transformation of The Mick parallels the transformation of American culture from willful innocence to knowing cynicism. To tell his story is to tell ours. ~ Jane Leavy

In all honesty, I don't envy you the possession of this power over memory, nor do I admire you. Because humans are usually completely unconcerned with the memories of other creatures. Human existence involves the willful destruction of the existential memories of other creatures and of your own memories as well. No life can survive without other lives, with the ecological memories of other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which the live. People don't realize they need to rely on the memories of other organisms to survive. You think that flowers bloom in colorful profusion just to please your eyes. That a wild boar exists just to provide meat for your table. That a fish takes the bait just for you sake. That only you can mourn. That a stone falling into a gorge is of no significance. That a sambar deer, its head bent low to sip at a creek is not a revelation . . . When in fact the finest movement of any organism represents a change in an ecosystem." The man with the compound eyes takes a deep sign and says: "But if you were any different you wouldn't be human. ~ Wu Ming-Yi

Cruelty: Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

John Grandin thought of himself as modern and civilized. To some extent he understood the neuroses of his fellow men. Perhaps they could not help themselves. But being uninhibited - the giving in to wayward impulse - is anarchy and chaos. Civilization means control; where would he be if he should let happen what was impossible and abhorrent to even think of? To hell with being "modern," "civilized," or "sophisticated." Actually there was no such thing, beyond a self-induced or superimposed state of mind, unsound and superficial. The "twentieth century mind" was a euphemism which such persons as the glittering Arne Eklund used as a veneer for willful behavior, an excuse for self-indulgence. Even modern man was born a primitive and would always be a primitive so long as he had a feeling heart in his breast. ~ Charles Jackson

Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless. To quickly grasp this concept, think of United States ~ James C. Collins

He looks as if he were three or four; looks just like one of those unapproachable, incomprehensible, willful little prehuman creatures, who in their ostensible innocence think only of themselves, who want to subordinate the whole world to their despotic will, and would do it, too, if one let them pursue their megalomaniacal ways and did not apply the strictest pedagogical principles to guide them to a disciplined, self-controlled, fully human existence. ~ Patrick Suskind

Recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action - and consequently accumulate grain on grain of willful choice like a very miser - never forgetting how one link dropped undone and indefinite number. - William James ~ Mason Currey

The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege.
In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America. ~ Tim Wise

. . . every society that grows extensive lawns could produce all its food on the same area, using the same resources, and . . . world famine could be totally relieved if we devoted the same resources of lawn culture to food culture in poor areas. These facts are before us. Thus, we can look at lawns, like double garages and large guard dogs, [and Humvees and SUVs] as a badge of willful waste, conspicuous consumption, and lack of care for the earth or its people.

Most lawns are purely cosmetic in function. Thus, affluent societies have, all unnoticed, developed an agriculture which produces a polluted waste product, in the presence of famine and erosion elsewhere, and the threat of water shortages at home. ~ Bill Mollison

For more than two decades I have tried, honestly and respectfully, to walk the difficult line between the world of Native America and the world of those of us whose people came, willingly or otherwise, to these American shores. I have done this because I believe that we, as Americans, are poorly served by our willful avoidance of the true facts of our national experience, and also because I believe that the lives and ways of the Native American peoples have much to teach us all. It ~ Kent Nerburn

Man is a creature of a willful head, And hardly driven is, but eas'ly led. ~ Samuel Daniel

In my head, I was getting 'gangsta,' which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting 'gangster' in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation. ~ Mat Johnson

There was a kind of willful stupidity about him. Eddie thought it was self-created and maybe propped up by his analyst, who would tell him about how he had to take care of himself, how he had to be the captain of his own ship, the author of his own destiny, respect his own desires, all that blah-blah. All the little code words and terms that meant it was all right to be a selfish fuck. That it was noble, even. ~ Stephen King

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself. ~ Frans De Waal

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the Stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-waiver Meal-drift molded ever and melted across skies? ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

This would have been the perfect time to continue with his ravishment scheme. He could lay siege to her virginal clothing. Ruthlessly dismantle her inhibitions. Steal an hour or two of fleeting pleasure before proving beyond a shadow of doubt: Romance is an exercise in willful delusion and nothing - nothing - ends happily. At least, not in this castle, and not with a man like him.
There was only one wrinkle in that scheme.
He liked her too much to go through with it. ~ Tessa Dare

Book Power

Books feed and cure and
chortle and collide.

In all this willful world
of thud and thump and thunder
man's relevance to books
continues to declare.

Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower,
steel, stitch, and cloud and clout,
and drumbeats in the air. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance. ~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already fully provided what what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed only by the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their willful inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But if the eminent Juggularius himself ever advocated in mere words a doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still more of that superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath nothing at all, even that which he hath, - then is the truest book in the world a lie. ~ Herman Melville

She loved this man. This wonderful, respectiful, willful man. And she couldn't even tell him. ~ Justine Dell

There can be no fooling ourselves into thinking this is something other than what it is - the willful ejection of Molly from our nest. It's too late for second thoughts, anyway. She has to be moved into her dorm in time for freshman orientation. It's been marked on the kitchen calendar for weeks - the expiration date on her childhood. ~ Susan Wiggs

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The sword is a handle onto the Way of the world that is offering itself to you. If you are willful it will weigh a ton and wear you out. If you lose focus it will cut open your hand. Mindfulness keeps your mind on the blade; and if you are mindful you will not think about the future or past, there will be no blocks to the flow of Tao, and the Way of the world will flow through the sword and through you. You will become the sword of the world. ~ Doc Pruyne

[T]he power of willful activity to shape the brain remains the working principle not only of early brain development, but also of brain function as an ongoing, living process. ~ Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous - simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. As it was, the precision of the movements of all the stars seemed astonishing. If we knew how we lined up among the planets, their motion would not seem so strange and willful. Also, had the philosophers been able to leave planet Earth for a jaunt in outer space, they could have seen that, at a distance from gravity and atmosphere, moving things tend to keep moving, without any need for an impelling force. From out there, the motion of the planets would seem natural as well. ~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes. ~ Emma Cline

In The Highland Book of Platitudes, Marlais, there's an entry that reads, "Not all ghosts earn our memory in equal measure." I think about this sometimes. I think especially about the word "earn," because it implies an ongoing willful effort on the part of the dead, so that if you believe the platitude, you have to believe in the afterlife, don't you? Following that line of thought, there seem to be certain people - call them ghosts - with the ability to insinuate themselves into your life with more belligerence and exactitude than others - it's their employment and expertise. ~ Howard Norman

Well, if that's the case, then it's not silly to see rejection as a gift whose contents and character may not be known until a later time. But that doesn't mean that the gift isn't real. It doesn't mean that the gift isn't precious. And it doesn't mean that the gift isn't helping us to subtly shift our thinking from willful expectation to grateful acceptance. We want our journey to be directed by God, not our adamant insistence that things go our way." "I may be guilty of that very tendency," I ~ Tavis Smiley

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Prophets often foretold destruction and sometimes the destruction did not come, yet this did not disprove their divine mission, as in the case of Jonah. For God is gracious, and ready to turn away his wrath from those who turn away from their sins. But the prophet who prophesied peace and prosperity absolutely and unconditionally without adding the necessary proviso, that they do not by willful sin put a bar in their own door and stop the coming of God's favors, will be proved a true prophet only by the accomplishment of his prediction. ~ Matthew Henry

Willful ignorance is blissful only in the mind of a remarkable fool. ~ Tracey Bond

There is a lot of willful incompetence in solar industry that is in the process of coming to light. ~ Steven Magee

The destructive power of pride is that it countenances nothing higher than itself. Because of an inherent fault in our nature, man's bias is on the side of error. In our willful desire to live independently of God, we have severed the lifeline that flows from the source of all life. ~ Billy Graham

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry. ~ Max Black