Willfully Quotes & Sayings

It will be a nuisance if he even suspects I spare the merest moment to ponder the Intruder, and he would willfully misinterpret it. I think of her only because I am concerned with their security. The thought was so lame and uncertain in his own mind, it made him growl. — K.M. Shea

Wizard's Tenth Rule
Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self. — Terry Goodkind

13 The foolish woman is noisy; she is simple and open to all forms of evil, she [willfully and recklessly] knows nothing whatever [of eternal value]. 14 For she sits at the door of her house or on a seat in the conspicuous places of the town, 15 Calling to those who pass by, who go uprightly on their way: 16 Whoever is simple (wavering and easily led astray), let him turn in here! And as for him who lacks understanding, she says to him, — Anonymous

Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung — Abraham Lincoln

The whole world dislikes kashays (inner weakness of anger-pride-deceit-greed) and yet, all the kashays of the world are done willfully. One doesn't like to be angry and yet he claims anger is necessary. — Dada Bhagwan

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. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. — J.K. Rowling

Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong."

~Albert Einstein

"Einstein is referring to ones 'legacy' and its intended future recipients as being willfully purposed to benefit them on their journey through this gift of life given to us by God — R. Alan Woods

You don't see many people crying over the wrong they do to God every time His word is neglected or when one willfully sins. — Monica Johnson

Anyone who willfully and maliciously attacks another without sufficient cause deserves no consideration. — Jeff Cooper

Proponents of canonical hermeneutics are either unintentionally or willfully naive here-in most cases the naivete is willful. Canonical readings simply act as if the evolution of the text is irrelevant to its meaning; usually this is because it is deemed to be more expedient for the purpose of exhorting a faith community if such considerations are put aside. — Thom Stark

We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right. — Julian Baggini

any society that willfully chooses not to take care of its own doesn't deserve to be called a society at all. — Christopher DeWan

I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. 'Because I have a program for the treadmill,' she explained. 'It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.' It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard. — Bill Bryson

I never meant to marry. In my opinion, a woman born in the last half of the nineteenth century of the Christian era suffered from enough disadvantages without willfully embracing another. — Barbara Mertz

The only reason a man should ever pick up a sword was to protect those he loved, not to willfully take the life of someone else's beloved. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Candidate Obama was either exceptionally naive or willfully disingenuous when he vowed to change the way Washington works. The very promise of Hope and Change was rooted in uprooting the Washington modus operandi. But instead of rejecting it, he embraced it all - the secrecy, the closed doors, the political favors, the near-criminal negligence. — Reince Priebus

But there are also much less dire reasons to have a manager, reasons that may have been useful to us but that we willfully ignored, or were just too stubborn or parsimonious to try. — Carrie Brownstein

Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years of pediatric surgery, I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother's life. If toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother's health, the doctor will induce labor or perform a Caesarean section. His intention is to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby's life is never willfully destroyed because the mother's life is in danger. — C. Everett Koop

It is the uninformed that willfully put a cellphone next to their brains. — Steven Magee

Trying to control the emotional self willfully by manipulative attempts is like trying to choose a number on a thrown die or to push back the water of the Kamo River upstream. Certainly, they end up aggravating their agony and feeling unbearable pain because of their failure in manipulating the emotions. — Shoma Morita

The precepts of the law may be comprehended under these three points: to live honestly, to hurt no man willfully, and to render every man his due carefully. — Aristotle.

Who is so deaf or so blind as is he that willfully will neither hear nor see? — John Heywood

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself
will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows
some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history
But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without. — Kurt Vonnegut

We teach aspirational ethics. What I teach my students is, You're born heroic. I go into these animal studies, and heroism is actually in our nature. What you have to do is make sure that the system doesn't change you, that our educational system doesn't teach you to be willfully blind and to forget your aspirations, because that's the default position. — Marc Edwards

There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and willfully go wrong for fear of being controlled. — Jean De La Bruyere

This is the real problem feminism faces. Too many people are willfully ignorant about what the word means and what the movement aims to achieve. — Roxane Gay

In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected, the ballot is a cunning swindle benefitting only the united barons of industry, trade and property. — Daniel Guerin

Work does not "give" dignity to our lives through the excellence or happiness it fosters. The dignity of work comes less from its ideal promise than from the way we show, through it, a determination to endure what is difficult for the sake of discharging our responsibilities and contributing to society. It is less the source of our happiness than the illustration that we deserve happiness. Through work we reveal our tough minded commitment in the face of conditions that cannot bend exactly to our will. When this commitment brings a partial triumph over an unaccommodating world, work illuminates something of the dignity that resides in us independent of the character of our work. It expresses a kind of defiance, for we willfully ignore the ultimate resistance of a world we yet try to shape. Thus work reveals, though it cannot produce, the dignity of those who take their condition to be at least partly of their own making. — Russell Muirhead

Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange. — Ludwig Von Mises

He was trying to prove to a willfully deaf and blind enemy that he was interesting to hear and see. — Kurt Vonnegut

They reciprocated the great and saving lie
that our love for things is greater than our lover for our love for things
willfully playing the parts they wrote for themselves, willfully creating and believing fictions necessary for life. — Jonathan Safran Foer

The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are all blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred. — George Bancroft

Dad said certain people's sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called "going Chekhovian:" some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs. — Marisha Pessl

It is human to err, but it is devilish to remain willfully in error. — Saint Augustine

Lies are attempts to hide the truth by willfully denying facts. Fiction, on the other hand, is an attempt to reveal the truth by ignoring facts. — John Green

In the case of the Catholic Church, it's hard to understand how they so willfully sacrifice the children. — Alex Gibney

Don't you stupid Aussies get it? Australia is doomed! Nothing, and nobody, can help you. You have sinned willfully after you have received knowledge of the truth. — Fred Phelps

In a city that worships the new and the sleek, the street market at Da Jing Road is willfully out of step. It is a splendid jumble of centuries, full of sizzling pot stickers and bleating cell phones, pungent rice wine and bullfrogs as plump as softballs. — Evan Osnos

I began to willfully indulge in dreams that, with the help of a bottle of wine, became completely mad and were close to being loathsome. — Georges Bataille

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more. — Franz Kafka

I, who have never willfully pained another, have no business to pain myself. — Marcus Aurelius

We don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are ... What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted
? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, and civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? p.761, The Goldfinch — Donna Tartt

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ... What nerve has atrophied in the torturer, or worse is sensually moved? — Storm Jameson

Ultimately the case for shunning animal flesh does not rest on what the Buddha allegedly said or didn't say. What is does rest on is our innate moral goodness, compassion, and pity which, when liberated, lead us to value all forms of life. It is obvious, then, that willfully to take life, or through the eating of meat indirectly to cause others to kill, runs counter to the deepest instincts of human beings. — Philip Kapleau

I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age. — Phyllis McGinley

I don't believe in God because certain reasons and arguments weigh more heavily in my mind than others, not because I have willfully decided to reject my creator, as many religious people seem to think. I could no more simply decide to believe in God than I could decide to like beetroot, just like that. — Julian Baggini

America has become amnesiac, a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated. — Henry Giroux

Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth. — Robert Graves

A man or a woman is said to be absorbed when the water has total control of him, and he no control of the water. A swimmer moves around willfully. An absorbed being has no will but the water's going. Any word or act is not really personal, but the way the water has of speaking or doing. As when you hear a voice coming out of a wall, and you know that it's not the wall talking, but someone inside, or perhaps someone outside echoing off the wall. Saints are like that. They've achieved the condition of a wall, or a door. — Rumi

I love people that willfully defy what you're supposed to be and create their own definition of their selves. — Spike Jonze

Implacable resentment is a shade in a
character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really
cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."
"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some
particular evil - a natural defect, which not even the best education
can overcome."
"And your defect is to hate everybody."
"And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to
misunderstand them. — Jane Austen

Nobility most fully resides not in success but in trying to do the right thing ... and that when we fail to do that, or willfully turn away from the challenge, hell follows. — Stephen King

What is to be done with millions of facts that bear witness that men, CONSCIOUSLY, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A man who leaves his wife is also a kind of immigrant. He rejects the home he's always known for another. Is it a surprise that Americans have the highest divorce rate in the world? If ditched lovers are also counted, then our rate of betrayal becomes truly stratospheric. To start over and advance or save ourselves, if only in our minds, we're willing to destroy everything. Soaked in a depthless, sampling culture, we're also expert at forgetting. Not only do we have no historical memory, but our personal past can be willfully and instantly erased, with hardly a ripple in its wake, and there's no one around, no community, to remind us of our shames. Extreme narcissists, we cling to bizarre narratives that allow us to make the most preposterous statements without flinching, or indulge in the most perverse and damaging behaviors. — Linh Dinh

The rest of the place was so dilapidated-but-trying that some of its offices and classrooms were still housed in old buildings abandoned by the neighboring State Mental Hospital, unfit for the mentally challenged but perfetly fine for "educating" the parated of probably-ought-to-major-in-business willfully ignorant know-nothings that rotated in and out of its former cells for a couple of months each semester before dropping out. — Mark Panek

I'll bet you want to know how a person like Stocky can be thrown into a debtors' prison, something this country outlawed about two hundred years ago. Right?" Samantha slowly nodded. Mattie continued, "More than likely, you're also certain that throwing someone in jail because he cannot pay a fine or a fee violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And, you are no doubt familiar with the 1983 Supreme Court decision, the name escapes me right now, in which the Court ruled that before a person can be thrown in jail for not paying a fine it must be proven that he or she was willfully not paying. In other words, he could pay but he refused. All this and more, right? — John Grisham

Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to form of mental agoraphobia and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters, they are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude through our own apathy. — J.K. Rowling

That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished. — Eula Biss

Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies
words
and so sank or floated with identical ease. But since truths were carved by the World, they rarely appeased Men and their innumerable vanities. Men hhad no taste for facts that did not ornament or enrich, and so they willfully
if not knowingly
panelled their lives with shining and intricate falsehoods. — R. Scott Bakker

I do not remember in my whole life I ever willfully misrepresented anything to anybody at any time. I have never knowingly had connection with a fraudulent scheme. — J. P. Morgan

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. — John Updike

No man can be a Christian by knowingly and willfully taking Christ on the installment plan, as Savior now, and Lord later. — Vance Havner

The worst of these comments came in mid-April from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, who said in a press conference, "This war is lost" and "The surge is not accomplishing anything." I was furious and shared privately with some of my staff a quote from Abraham Lincoln I had written down long before: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged. — Robert M. Gates

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. — David Platt

Consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and involuntarily, willfully and unsuspectingly, our beliefs are the sum total of our lives. It's that simple. — Patty Houser

If the giving of the Law, while it was yet unbroken, was attended with such a display of awe-inspiring power, what will that day be when the Lord shall, with flaming fire, take vengeance on those who have willfully broken that Law? — Charles Spurgeon

The people who most often invited trouble were the willfully ignorant who didn't want to believe trouble was possible, so they dismissed the potential for it. You couldn't be ready for what you never considered or were unwilling to consider. — Terry Goodkind

That is a failing indeed!" cried Elizabeth. "Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me." "There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil - a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them." "Do — Jane Austen

I never willfully want to write the same record twice, which is probably why I jump from project to project. But I can't ignore that there are things that inspire me, and I love celebrating those. — Alan Palomo

Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians. — Seth Klarman

Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles - long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes - Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were - to me - so tender and particular they moved to despair. — Donna Tartt

You're too sympathetic, the General said. You didn't see the danger in the major because he was fat and you took pity on him for that. Now the evidence shows that you've been willfully blind to the fact that Sonny is not only a left-wing radical but potentially a communist sleeper agent. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

That the utopia I thought the online world created, where people don't have to be ashamed of what they love and could connect with each other regardless of what they looked like, was really a place where people could steep themselves in their own worldview until they became willfully blind to everyone else's. I — Felicia Day

Where race is involved, there is a pronounced and proven tendency in the United States for the majority culture to willfully misremember the history and turn it upside down. — Taylor Branch

What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Next time you're about to rule out some guy because he's not your ideal, try to focus on the good things about him, because some guy is going to have to focus on the good things about you, even though he may have wanted someone more easygoing or taller. Every time you start to dissect some guy, note that he's willfully ignoring all of this in order to go out with you. — Lori Gottlieb

Oh, what peril attaches to sin willfully committed! For it is so difficult for man to bring himself to penance, and without penitence guilt remains and will ever remain, so long as man retains unchanged the will to sin, or is intent upon committing it. — Catherine Of Genoa

I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate. — Michel De Montaigne

How do you know? You've done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?" How could someone like him have the slightest clue what it felt like to be me? I felt almost cross with him for willfully not getting it. "Go on. Open — Jojo Moyes

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

That to judge others was to willfully do them harm. Respecting differences, she gathered, went beyond simply making allowances; it meant giving up your blinkered perspective, your assumption that you are necessarily right and others necessarily wrong, that the world would be a better place if everyone thought as you did. — A.S.A Harrison

Artist refers to a person, willfully enmeshed in a dilemma of categories, who performs as if none of them existed. — Allan Kaprow

It strikes her that, until these last weeks, she has lived in an impossibly small universe, willfully blinded to the vastness of existence outside of her chosen life. And perhaps, she thinks, that is how everyone lives. Perhaps it is exactly these blinders that the complacency and comfort of our days depends upon: we survive by shutting out the endless questions of what else might be. — Matthew Flaming

... my words are love
which willfully parades in
its room, refusing to move. — Frank O'Hara

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. — Garth Greenwell

What is remarkable in Burke's first performance," wrote his great nineteenth-century biographer John Morley, "is his discernment of the important fact that behind the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself."4 A caustic and simplistic skepticism of all traditional institutions, supposedly grounded in a scientific rationality that took nothing for granted but in fact willfully ignored the true complexity of social life, seemed to Burke poorly suited for the study of society, and even dangerous when applied to it. Burke would warn of, and contend with, this force for the rest of his life. — Yuval Levin

There are no doubts that western governments are willfully inducing radiation sickness into segments of their city populations. — Steven Magee

In this country, two things stand first in rank: your flag and your mail. You all know what honor you pay to your flag, but you should know, also, that your mail, - just that ordinary postal card - is also important. But a postal card, or any form of mail, is not important, in that way, until you drop it through a slot in this building, and with a stamp on it, or into a mail box outdoors. Up to that instant it is but a common card, which anybody can pick up and carry off without committing a criminal act. But as soon as it is in back of this partition, or in a mail box, a magical transformation occurs; and anybody who now should willfully purloin it, or obstruct its trip in any way, will find prison doors awaiting him. What a frail thing ordinary mail is! A baby could rip it apart, but no adult is so foolish as to do it. That small stamp which you stick on it, is, you might say, a postal official, going right along with it, having it always in his sight. — Ernest Vincent Wright

We are broken open, or we willfully shed. — Mark Nepo

Come awake, Tom. Fathers can willfully hurt their children. They can be addicts too weak to give up their vices, no matter the pain it causes. Mothers can turn you invisible with neglect. They can erase you with a denial, a refusal to see. Friends can deceive you. People lie. It is a cold, hard world. I do not blame Nell Hawkins for retreating from it into a madness of her own choosing. — Libba Bray

To be counter to the culture, you are by definition willfully and actively ignoring the culture, i.e., reality. — Rob Lowe

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 — Lysa TerKeurst

Love is not control. Love is willfully given and received. Love does not rush people who are broken. It's patient and kind and long suffering. — Love Belvin

What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted - ? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? — Donna Tartt

To develop patience, you need someone who willfully hurts you. Such people give us real opportunities to practice tolerance. They test our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot. Basically, patience protects us from being discouraged. — Dalai Lama

No soul willfully does wrong. — Plato

We seek in one another the assurance that there is just one correct interpretation of the world, that everything is so simple that anybody can see it unless they're malicious or stupid or willfully ignorant; and we punish one another for proving with our differing conclusions that the truth is not that easy. We think we must suppress dissension to present the unified front we need to gain power over our enemies. But there are pro-life Democrats, pro-choice Christians, feminists who love their families, and conservatives who care about poor people. — Alisa Harris

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. — Barbara Olson

The people can never willfully betray their own interests: But they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people; and the danger will be evidently greater where the whole legislative trust is lodged in the hands of one body of men, than where the concurrence of separate and dissimilar bodies is required in every public act. — James Madison