quotations about choice
I believe the measure of a man isn't just the road he's traveled; it's the choices he's made along the way.
JOE BIDEN
acceptance speech, Aug. 27, 2008
I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen.
CHARLES LAMB
Essays of Elia
Life is not made up of a single moment, it's made up of a gazillion moments. What defines us is the choice we make in the next moment, and the one after that.
HENRY SPENCER
"Murder?...Anyone?...Anyone?...Bueller?", Psych
Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Where there is force there is no choice.
JOHN JORTIN
Sermons on Different Subjects
There are moments in our lives when we find ourselves at a crossroads. Afraid. Confused. Without a roadmap. The choices we make in those moments can define the rest of our days.
LUCAS SCOTT
"Things I Forgot at Birth", One Tree Hill
You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Survivor
For our choices take our dimensions in two ways: First, by the kind of them. We may select paltry and showy things, ease, pleasures which have no mind in them, cheap influence with our fellows. Whether there be baseness in this, or whether, as the Stoics would have it, it be only such a savage ignorance as would choose a glass bead before a book, the reckoning is the same as to coarse grain in character; and they who publish this measure of themselves do, indeed, like heavy-bearded cowards, assume but "nature's excrement" to make themselves respected. If we set our choice so high that perforce the low must be left, so high as beauty, generosity, strength of mind, stores of knowledge, memories of the hungry fed, the forsaken cheered, the fallen lifted, humane works watched and reenforced--it is no more than to elect the things which mark us as men.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
A victim of collision on the open sea
Nobody ever said that life was free
Sank, swam, go down with the ship
But use your freedom of choice
DEVO
"Freedom of Choice"
The difficulty in life is the choice.
GEORGE MOORE
The Bending of the Bough
He that will not when he may,
When he will he shall have nay.
ROBERT BURTON
Anatomy of a Melancholy
The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Committed
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
FLORA WHITTEMORE
attributed, Quote Unquote
What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?
JIM BUTCHER
White Night
It is only the superior man who can make a right choice.
CONFUCIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
We make our decisions, and then our decisions turn around and make us.
F. W. BOREHAM
attributed, The Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations
When in doubt of what is right, consult your pillow overnight.
MEXICAN PROVERB