Willful Quotes

1. "My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen." — Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)"
Author: Aimee Bender

2. "If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?"
Author: Alain De Botton

3. "Man does not ask for nightmares, he does not ask to be bad. He does not will his own willfulness."
Author: Anthony Burgess

4. "It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy."
Author: Arthur Schopenhauer

5. "The decision that has to be made was whether it was material, whether he knew he was lying under oath, whether he did it willfully. I think that's required of any prosecutor who is charged with an investigation of this."
Author: Barbara Olson

6. "Once, maybe I would have thought you a fool, but...well, that's kind of what trust is, isn't it? A willful self-delusion? You have to shut out that voice that whispers about betrayal, and just hope that your friends aren't going to hurt you."
Author: Brandon Sanderson

7. "SELFBENEATH THE SURFACE,VEILED ON PURPOSE,ALL KNOWING AND GRAND,DIRECTED, GUIDED, BY THE ETERNAL HAND,SUSTAINED, FULFILLED, FULL OF LIGHT,REALIZATION ACHIEVED, BY WILLFUL MIGHT."
Author: Charles Edward

8. "This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves."
Author: Charles Yu

9. "Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again."
Author: Cintra Wilson

10. "Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist."
Author: David Byrne

11. "So what is the difference between someone who willfully indulges in sexual pleasures while ignoring the Bible on moral purity and someone who willfully indulges in the selfish pursuit of more and more material possessions while ignoring the Bible on caring for the poor? The difference is that one involves a social taboo in the church and the other involves the social norm in the church."
Author: David Platt

12. "A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn't stop change in general. Rivers can't run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn't put words to it. All he knew was, neither of them had changed their minds and neither of them could find anything more to say. (229)"
Author: David Wroblewski

13. "But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light."
Author: Donna Tartt

14. "Revere your senses; don't degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you're not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is - your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don't pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

15. "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."
Author: Emmuska Orczy

16. "There is no young creature, my Lord, who so greatly wants, or so earnestly wishes for, the advice and assistance of her friends, as I do: I am new to the world, and unused to acting for myself;-my intentions are never willfully blameable, yet I err perpetually!"
Author: Fanny Burney

17. "To be "in charge" is certainly not only to carry out the proper measures yourself but to see that every one else does so too; to see that no one either willfully or ignorantly thwarts or prevents such measures. It is neither to do everything yourself nor to appoint a number of people to each duty, but to ensure that each does that duty to which he is appointed."
Author: Florence Nightingale

18. "One is always willfully absurd.... If one does not say silly things with a purpose, then he is merely an idiot."
Author: Galen Beckett

19. "The Newtonian scheme became an illusion of determinism in a tempestuous world of human actions. Economists became preoccupied with mechanical models of markets and uninterested in the willful people who inhabit them."
Author: George Gilder

20. "It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this "who" in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the "who," which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters. This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for (the doer of good works) nor against them (the criminal) that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure."
Author: Hannah Arendt

21. "Oh yes. You've caught me. I confess. My sole purpose in life is to gleefully, willfully, maniacally destroy all of your precious chrome babies."
Author: Jennifer Estep

22. "It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, "Listen to me."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

23. "If there is a nuclear tactic being used here, I submit it is the use of that obstruction where a willful minority blocks a bipartisan majority from voting on the President's judicial nominees."
Author: John Cornyn

24. "The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble -- a tombstone. When he got to his feet and dusted himself down he saw that it read, in Latin, 'Resurgam' -- 'I Will Rise Again."
Author: Jonathan Barnes

25. "Now think of what these foolish young people do when they marry out of the Church or out of the temple and remain satisfied with such a union? They cut themselves off from the exaltation in the kingdom of God. They deny to themselves the glorious privilege of being members of the family of God which is spoken of by Paul. For said he the whole family of God are blessed by his name, and they deny to themselves the privilege of belonging to our Father's family.Moreover they place themselves where they cannot receive the blessings of eternal increase, but must remain forever alone, evidently miserable in the thought that they have willfully denied themselves the glorious privileges of eternal exaltation."
Author: Joseph Fielding Smith

26. "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."
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

27. "He had promised Charles Danvers that he would stay away from his daughter and he had willfully and recklessly broke that vow despite the best of intentions. However, Charles Danvers had made many promises as well, promises he broke when he took his own life. So if his old friend's ghost ever did come a-haunting, Grey would feel reasonably justified in telling him to sod off."
Author: Kathryn Smith

28. "Bronson always said that, of all the girls, Louisa was most like her mother, and he didn't mean it as a compliment. Both were mercurial, passionate, willful. Louisa had seen despair like Abba's from the inside. She had inherited it the way some daughters came into a silver tray or a set of spoons."
Author: Kelly O'Connor McNees

29. "There in the hospital Billy was having an adventure very common among people without power in times of war: he was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he is interesting to hear and see."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

30. "She dressed in bohemian clothes, penned novels, panted, and yearned to roam forgotten corners of the world. She was habitually defiant and fearless, and when she felt controlled, as she often did, should could be irresistibly willfull. Mostly, she was bored silly by the vanilla sort boys who trailed her around, and by the stodgy set in Miami Beach."
Author: Laura Hillenbrand

31. "God never intended us to want anything more than we want Him. Just the slightest glimpse into His Word proves that, Look at what the Bible says about God's chosen people, the Israelites, when they wanted food more than they wanted God: 'They willfully put God to the test by demanding the food they craved' (Psalm 78:18). Yikes"
Author: Lysa TerKeurst

32. "The biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to."
Author: Margaret Heffernan

33. "Money is just one of the forces that blind us to information and issues which we could pay attention to - but don't. It exacerbates and often rewards all the other drivers of willful blindness; our preference for the familiar, our love for individuals and for big ideas, a love of busyness and our dislike of conflict and change, the human instinct to obey and conform and our skill at displacing and diffusing responsibility. All of these operate and collaborate with varying intensities at different moments in our lives. The common denominator is that they all make us protect our sense of self-worth, reducing dissonance and conferring a sense of security, however illusory. In some ways, they all act like money; making us feel good at first, with consequences we don't see. We wouldn't be so blind if our blindness didn't deliver rewards; the benefit of comfort and ease."
Author: Margaret Heffernan

34. "Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die; it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek. Beloved boy, so willful and brooding, your sacrifice will have enriched not my life but my death....Centuries as yet unborn within the dark womb of time would pass by thousands over that tomb without restoring life to him, but likewise without adding to his death, and without changing the fact that he had been."
Author: Marguerite Yourcenar

35. "Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze."
Author: Matthew Scully

36. "(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")"
Author: Maurice Maeterlinck

37. "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."
Author: Milan Kundera

38. "The young deemed themselves happy. The elder spirits, if they knew that mirth was but the counterfeit of happiness, yet followed the false shadow willfully, because at least her garments glittered brightest. Sworn triflers of a lifetime, they would not venture among the sober truths of life not even to be truly blest."
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

39. "No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is."
Author: Nicole Krauss

40. "But instinct is something which transcends knowledge. We have, undoubtedly, certain finer fibers that enable us to perceive truths when logical deduction, or any other willful effort of the brain, is futile."
Author: Nikola Tesla

41. "It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child, and yet at times this voice makes fun of him, or calls him to attention, or curses him in no uncertain terms. At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing the facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth. Then he must speak to it in his own voice and tell it to stop, thus returning it to the silence it came from. At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain. And even when it says nothing, he knows it is still there, and in the silence of this voice that says nothing, he waits for it to speak."
Author: Paul Auster

42. "Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline."
Author: Paul Graham

43. "And since we don't just forget things because they don't matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania"
Author: Philip Roth

44. "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."
Author: Richard Rolle

45. "Willful ignorance or resistance to alleged facts has been a big ingredient in any success I've had."
Author: Rob Delaney

46. "And you're not leaving," she said. "Promise me."It was as if she had asked him to promise to keep breathing, to notice sunshine, to permit the spinning of the earth. What choice did he have? Even if he left her, she would be camped in his heart, an insistent and willful presence. She would match her strides to his on any journey he ever took; she would lie beside him on any bed.Amalie, he said, "that's the easiest promise I've ever had to make."
Author: Sharon Shinn

47. "Willful blindness sees no end of damage done."
Author: Stephen Richards

48. "Tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Shakespeare's Henry V—the story of a willful and immature prince who becomes a passionate but sensitive, callous but sentimental, inspiring but flawed king—begins with the exhortation "O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention." For Steve Jobs, the ascent to the brightest heaven of invention begins with a tale of two sets of parents, and of"
Author: Walter Isaacson

49. "I was convicted of three misdemeanors of willful failure to file a form."
Author: Wesley Snipes

50. "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible."
Author: Woodrow Wilson

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