Will

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

You must not only aim right, but draw the bow with all your might.

The will needs a goal, and we'd rather will Nothingness than not will, rather believe than not know.

This world is the will to power and nothing besides!...And you, yourselves, are also the will to power, and nothing besides!

The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.

Carefully watch your thoughts, for they become your words. Manage and watch your words, for they will become your actions. Consider and judge your actions, for they have become your habits. Acknowledge and watch your habits, for they shall become your values. Understand and embrace your values, for they become your destiny.

Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.

What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it sub- ordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last.

By J.R.R. Tolkien The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called 'self-realization' (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriage entails that: great mortification. No man, however truly he loved his betrothed and bride as a young man, has lived faithful to her as a wife in mind and body without deliberate conscious exercise of the will, without self-denial. Too few are told that—even those brought up 'in the Church.’ When the glamour wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. And of course they are, as a rule, quite right: they did make a mistake. Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. Only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were 'destined' for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life. In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an un-fallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth. *Abridged from a letter to Michael Tolkien, March 6-8, 1941. From The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, 2000).

JFK-Phx Quotes: The were three words in Greek which covered most kind of love (Eros = sexual love, storge = family affection, Philia = friendship) but the NT word for 'love' or 'charity' is Agape, which has hardly any use in classical Gk.--I.e., it is a new word for a new thing. It is obvious that it cannot mean 'an involuntary sentiment.' we all say God is wise, and habitually argue as if He were a fool! How could He be commanding the involuntary? Agape is best seen, i think, in the words 'love your neighbors as yourself', i.e. By an act of will, aim at your neighbor's good in  the same way you aim at your own.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.

Much of the misery in our Christian life comes not because the devil tackles us, but because we have never understood the simple laws of our make-up. We have to treat the body as the servant of Jesus Christ: when the body says “Sit,” and He says “Go,” go! When the body says “Eat,” and He says “Fast,” fast! When the body says “Yawn,” and He says “Pray,” pray!

The trick would be to find which few of them had the potential for raw power, the nearly superhuman stamina, the indomitable willpower, and the intellectual capacity necessary to master the details of technique. And which of them, coupled improbably with all those other qualities, had the most important one: the ability to disregard his own ambitions, to throw his ego over the gunwales, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell, and to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other boys in the boat.

To defeat an adversary who was your equal, maybe even your superior, it wasn’t necessarily enough just to give your all from start to finish. You had to master your opponent mentally. When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not—that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself, make him falter just when it counted the most. Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your own heart.

Choice is always performed against a background of habit.

Winning isn’t everything. Wanting to win is.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult

And then he packs up the battery and clamps and corrugated iron and puts everything in the garage. Not because he doesn’t think those morons deserve a proper electric shock. Because they do. But because he knows it’s been awhile since someone reminded him of the difference between being wicked because one has to be or because one can. Chapter 28. A Man Who Was Ove and a Man Who Was Rune

‘You ought to begin to understand, Frodo, after all you have heard,’ said Gandalf. ‘He hated it and loved it, as he hated and loved himself. He could not get rid of it. He had no will left in the matter.

‘Neither brave nor silly, I think. I could hardly help myself. I seemed to be drawn somehow.

‘In that hour I looked on Aragorn and thought how great and terrible a Lord he might have become in the strength of his will, had he taken the Ring to himself. Not for naught does Mordor fear him. But nobler is his spirit than the understanding of Sauron; for is he not of the children of Lúthien? Never shall that line fail, though the years may lengthen beyond count.’

Instead, our victims face us indignantly. For they know we have violated them with something powerfully and peculiarly personal. We have willingly hurt them. We have done it on purpose. Sin outstrips other human troubles by perverting special human excellences. When people devise and defend high-minded political fraud, when a musician feels a spasm of happy satisfaction over the sour review of a colleague’s recital, when a drug dealer wants and plans

11 Let us add that the disposition to commit sins also displeases God and deserves blame, and let us therefore use the word sin to refer to such instances of both act and disposition. 12 Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.

The reason in both cases is that by flouting the deliverances of his own conscience, a person breaks trust with God. For by doing what he thinks is wrong, a person does what he thinks will grieve God, and the willingness to grieve God by one’s acts is itself grievous. 23 Moreover, acting against one’s conscience blunts and desensitizes it; indeed, repeated thwarting of one’s conscience might eventually kill it. The subjective sinner therefore risks moral suicide.

All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad. Acts are either right or wrong, either consonant with God’s will or not.

Involuntary sins are surprisingly common. For example, the traditional seven deadly sins (pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust) are usually involuntary. They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which a person may have little or, at best, only variable control. Faithful warriors against these sins thus experience familiar failures, slight improvements, backslidings, painful conquests, Pyrrhic victories, broken treaties, and humiliating compromises.

They are desires, beliefs, and attitudes over which a person may have little or, at best, only variable control. Faithful warriors against these sins thus experience familiar failures, slight improvements, backslidings, painful conquests, Pyrrhic victories, broken treaties, and humiliating compromises. The Scriptures claim that human beings need powerful outside intervention to control and eventually conquer their faults, but all veterans of the sin wars know this by personal experience as well.

Reformation documents offer a number of images for corruption: it is a despoiled nature, a diseased root, a contaminated spring, a foul heart. 43 According to these documents, we are wrong at the core. A bad strain has gotten into the stock so that we now sin with the ease and readiness of people born to the task. After the fall we sin by second nature: we are “born sinners” as some folk are born athletes. This fact, empirical as well as biblical, lies behind a broad consensus on original sin. Although, partly because of the silence of Scripture, Christians of various theological orientations differ on central issues in the doctrine of original sin —for example, how a child acquires the fateful disposition to sin, whether this disposition is itself sin, how to describe and assess the accompanying bondage of the will44 —they agree on the universality, solidarity, stubbornness, and historical momentum of sin. That is to say, all serious Christians subscribe to the generic doctrine of corruption, the centerpiece of which is the claim that even when they are good in important ways, human beings are not sound.

Good spiritual hygiene includes a practiced ability to assess goods (goods seldom come with their weights written on them) plus the power of will to pursue them with appropriate degrees of interest and to enjoy them with a fitting level of pleasure.

We still do not know why a person succumbs to the motive.

At bottom, the heart wants what it wants, and the heart has its reasons that reason does not know.

If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.