Quotes About Choices

We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.

Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled but the road with the exit ramp.

remarked to Mom how all the books we were reading then shared not just length but a certain theme: fate and the effects of the choices people make. "I think most good books share that theme," Mom said.

Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary.

We found ourselves discussing the three kinds of fateful choices that exist in the two books: the ones characters make knowing that they can never be undone; the ones they make thinking they can but learn they can't; and the ones they make thinking they can't and only later come to understand, when it's too late, when "nothing can be undone," that they could have.

Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

Quick, cheap, or good, pick two.

The wonder of markets is that they reconcile the choices of myriad individuals.

For the first time in his life he realized that sometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

S]ometimes in life you go through doors that only open one way. You can stand before them and think about whether you want to go through them or not. But when you do and the door closes behind you there is no way to go back. The door is featureless and unknobbed and smooth as a sheet of glass. You can pound on it and claw till your fingers are bleeding, scream until your throat is raw, but no one will open the door, no one will even hear you.

Binder was living on the edge already and knowing it, knowing that he was spending time like money he might not be able to replace.

The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn't to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers "a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language." A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author's agile mind.

I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.

When I look back now over my life and call to mind what I might have had simply for taking and did not take, my heart is like to break.

Todo lo que encontramos en la vida, es la resultante de nuestras acciones; por consiguiente, cada persona puede ser dueña de su destino haciéndose dueña de sus acciones. Cada uno es responsable de las acciones que dan lugar al propio sufrimiento. Cada uno posee los medios para acabar con el sufrimiento que provocan sus acciones.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

People who don't know me well wonder that I'd give up my badge for an apron, thinking that flipping burgers is a big step down. If they asked me, which they don't, I would tell them that when a man stumbles onto happiness, he'd be a fool to pass it by. It's as simple as that. Sam's Place makes me happy.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

Una de las grandes tragedias de nuestra existencia es ver cómo tantos hombres y mujeres desperdician sus vidas. El

It is better to love wisely, no doubt: but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all

Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.

It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.

Choices whose outcomes matter even though they are neither deterministic nor completely random surround us all the time. So it is not surprising that in all human societies, entire professions have been based on the making of such predictions—think of astrologers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, weather forecasters, or . . . politicians.

Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible.