For example, I hesitate between staying home and working or going out to a nightclub: these are not two separable ‘objects,’ but two orientations, each of which carries a sum of possible or even hallucinatory perceptions (not only of drinking, but the noise and smoke of the bar; not only of working, but the hum of the word processor and the surrounding silence …). And if we return to motives in order to study them for a second time, they have not stayed the same. Like the weight on a scale, they have gone up or down. The scale has changed according to the amplitude of the pendulum. The voluntary act is free because the free act is what expresses the entire soul at a given moment of its duration. That act is what expresses the self. Does Adam sin freely? In other words, at that instant his soul has taken an amplitude that is found to be easily filled by the aroma and taste of the apple, and by Eve’s solicitations. Another amplitude – one having retained God’s defense – is possible. The whole question turns on ‘laziness.’
– Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, trans. Tom Conley, Continuum, London, 2006, pp. 79-80
