Quotes About Choices

Desires dictate our priorities, priorities shape our choices, and choices determine our actions. The desires we act on determine our changing, our achieving, and our becoming.

Just because something is good is not a sufficient reason for doing it. The number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives.

Women have been brought up with the false sense that they have all the options in the world. We don't understand that the culture really isn't offering us all of these options – there still are very strong pressures to conform. We have to step outside the culture to be able to make choices that will really give us what we want. But we lack the psychic mechanisms to do this, to really choose.

We stumble into our graves knowing so well how to have done better.

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.

As her husband held her close, she could feel the pulse of other choices, other lives, opening up beneath her. Her past crackled behind her like a terrible lightning, branches and branches, endless, and then nothing.

If Stu chews shoes, should Stu choose the shoes he chews?

Because if there's one thing we've learned, it's that, unless we give him a viable alternative, today's angry young man is destined to become tomorrow's lonely and embittered middle-aged man.

We all want more information available when making health care decisions for ourselves and our families.

I learned that we can do anything, but we can't do everything... at least not at the same time. So think of your priorities not in terms of what activities you do, but when you do them. Timing is everything.

Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become.

Why does that evening's memory Return with this night's storm - A party twenty years ago, Its disappointments warm? There are so many MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS WHAT-IFS that won't stay buried Other cities, other jobs Strangers we might have married And memory insists on pining For places it never went, As if life would be happier Just by being different

I've become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them. There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation.

We are tyrannized by our options.

Believe it or not, lots of people change their majors and abandon their dreams just to avoid a couple of math classes in college.

I wasn't in school often enough to really belong to a 'clique ' but my friends all studied hard and got pretty good grades. They were good people with self-respect. I still like to be friends with people I admire something about I really believe that we become like the people we're surrounded by, so I choose my friends carefully!

Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices. This is why Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people—specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together.

Clearly, your behavior matters beyond yourself and is an important reason to get healthy now.

but of all the things you might do in your final ten minutes, it's a pretty safe bet that few of them are things you actually did today.

What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.

And the first step in bulldozing these obstacles is to enumerate them. As Peters puts it, "What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.

Lawyers often face intense demands but have relatively little "decision latitude." Behavioral scientists use this term to describe the choices, and perceived choices, a person has. In a sense, it's another way of describing autonomy—and lawyers are glum and cranky because they don't have much of it.

In the American Regret Survey, twenty-year-olds had equal numbers of action and inaction regrets. But as people grew older, inaction regrets began to dominate. By age fifty, inaction regrets were twice as common as action regrets. Indeed, according to the data, age was by far the strongest predictor of regrets of inaction. When the universe of opportunities before them has dwindled (as it has with older folks), people seem to regret what they haven't done.