We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

Most of us live our lives by accident — we live as it happens. Fullfillment comes when we live our lives on purpose.

"I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I took the one less travled by,
And that has made all the difference.

As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.

> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67"

Often we find our own destiny on the same roads that we have been avoiding.

So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder.

I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way — there's a chance, and it's very strange sometimes.

Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.

The way comes about as we walk it.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

لم نولد لنكون على الطريق نفسه.

Desire sets our compass, but real life steers our course.

Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes.