Quotes About Choices

When you understand where you are in your development and what stage is coming up next, you can make choices that anticipate future challenges and thereby accelerate the pace of your development.

Steve did not have a death wish. He had the exact opposite. His appetite for life was so strong, it outweighed all fear. So what if his choices shortened his life? His choices filled his life, and enriched the lives of those around him.

Learning to stop sweating the small stuff involves deciding what things to engage in and what things to ignore. From a certain perspective, life can be described as a series of mistakes, one right after another with a little space in between.

This sense of entitlement contributes mightily to sloppiness, to low incentive, to boredom, to bad choices, to instant gratification, to constant demands for more, and to all kinds of addictions (including the addiction to technology).

Life's passed along to us empty. We have to make up the happiness part.

Worthy character is best forged from a life of consistent, correct choices centered in the teachings of the Master.

If you are ever tempted to experiment with the alluring offerings of Lucifer first calmly analyze the inevitable consequences of such choices and your life will not be shattered. You cannot ever sample those things that are forbidden of God as destructive of happiness and corrosive to spiritual guidance without tragic results.

Strong moral character results from consistent correct choices in the trials and testing of life. Your faith can guide you to those correct choices.

First, incentives are not properly aligned. If you engage in environmentally costly behavior next year, through your consumption choices, you will probably pay nothing for the environmental harms that you inflict.

If private companies or public officials think that one policy produces better outcomes, they can greatly influence the outcome by choosing it as the default.

Bargains and Rip-Offs

The premise of the article, and later the book, is that in our increasingly complicated world people cannot be expected to have the expertise to make anything close to optimal decisions in all the domains in which they are forced to choose.

people make good choices in contexts in which they have experience, good information, and prompt feedback—say, choosing among ice cream flavors.

10. Calories count in New York City. The Big Apple recently adopted a law that requires fast-food restaurants with at least fifteen outlets in the city to post, in prominent places, the calories of each of their food items so that customers can make informed choices.

It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices they face into the experiences they will have.

Self-control issues are most likely to arise when choices and their consequences are separated in time.

Indeed, as we have seen, the drama and tragedy of the moral life lies in the fact that most human disagreement is between opposing goods rather than between right and wrong.

He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time. (Old Haunts)

Lonnie Athens demonstrates to the contrary that violent people come to their violence by the same universal processes of soliloquy and dramatic self-change that carry the rest of us to conformity, pacifism, greatness, eccentricity or sainthood—and bear equal responsibility for their choices.

How you do life is your real and final truth, not what ideas you believe.

You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

We wear the chains we forge in life

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.