Quotes About Choice

If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

You cannot have your cake and eat it.

A door must either be shut or open.

You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Between two stools one sits on the ground.

When you cannot make up your mind between two evenly balanced courses of action, choose the bolder.

When confronted with two courses of action I jot down on a piece of paper all the arguments in favor of each one, then on the opposite side I write the arguments against each one. Then by weighing the arguments pro and con and cancelling them out, one against the other, I take the course indicated by what remains.

You cannot have it both ways.

I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness. Other things being equal, I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.

Of two evils, choose the less.

Of two evils, choose the prettier.

Where bad's the best, bad must be the choice.

Both choices are painful, but only one is therapeutic.

Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice.

Not to decide is to decide.

In not making the decision, you've made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.

Of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

What must be, shall be; and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing.

A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want, peace or war, and then to get ready for what you want; for what we prepare for is what we shall get.

The last, if not the greatest, of the human freedoms: to choose their own attitude in any given circumstance.

You can and you can't, You will and you won't; You'll be damn'd if you do, You'll be damn'd if you don't.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?