Quotes About Choices

Living and dying is not the big issue. The big issue is what you're going to do with your time while you are here.

There is not enough time to do all the nothing we want to do.

Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some people just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles - Calvin

With approximately 75 per cent of our rubbish generated by packaging, a few simple steps - buying loose fruit and veg, choosing products with recyclable packaging, and avoiding individually wrapped portions - can have a big impact.

As you write about your life, there's a lot of things that you think about that you regret. It's interesting, because one of the things I regret the most is spending so much time focused on wrestling as opposed to focusing on my family.

I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

Every man writes his manner. I just made poor decisions.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.

As years pass, and the abundance of the future is depleted, the crux of old mistakes and the cost of old choices are ever recalibrated. Resentment, the interest in umbrage derived from being wronged, is computed minute by minute, savagely, however you try to ignore it.

Being vulnerable to desolation also arises from being unable to picture a set of choices with which to change your lot in life

I have so few choices, really, if I can't get myself back home. Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end—you go out far enough in the direction of—somewhere—and you realize that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything.

If we forgo matters of right and wrong on a human scale, we invite disaster in every door and window and via every mountain pass and harbor.

Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.

Our habits are our destiny.

I've been haunted for years by a public service poster I saw just one time, in the subway. It was a photo of a Chinese food take-out container sitting on top of two videos. The caption read, "If this is how you spend your time, why are you living in New York?

Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong.

This freedom from decision making is crucial, because when I have to decide—which often involves resisting temptation or postponing gratification—I tax my self-control.

it doesn't matter what we think a person (or ourselves) "should be able to" do—what matters is only what works for each individual. To help people change their habits or behavior, we should help get them what they need to succeed, whether that's more clarity, more information, more outer accountability, or more choices.

In one study, when subjects made a shopping list for what they'd eat in a week, more chose a healthy snack instead of an unhealthy snack; when asked what they'd choose now, more people chose the unhealthy over the healthy snack.

The false choices offered by spectacular abundance — choices based on the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected roles (signified and embodied primarily by objects) — develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities.

the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves

One man sees a riselka: his life forks there. Two men see a riselka: one of them shall die. Three men see a riselka: one is blessed, one forks, one shall die. One woman sees a riselka: her path comes clear to her. Two women see a riselka: one of them shall bear a child. Three women see a riselka: one is blessed, one is clear, one shall bear a child.

By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.