Quotes About Choice

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Today, I view myself as a pilgrim. I take stock of the distances I have traveled. I take time to map the route I now choose.

Understand that WHAT must come before the HOW. First choose WHAT you would do. The HOW usually falls into place of itself.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Kindness is always just as visible as the cruelty you choose to see. Your eye does the beholding. I say to you, this is a beautiful world. Choose to see it so.

We are not, as we had told ourselves, the victim of circumstances. We played an active part in our own undoing.

Optimism is a practiced choice.

Primeiro, escolha o que gostaria de fazer. O como geralmente irá se alinhar.

Cómo iban a poder si su propio hábito de beber es algo a lo que quieren aferrarse? «Saber lo que prefieres, en lugar de decir sumisamente "amén" a lo que el mundo te dice que debieras preferir, significa que has mantenido tu alma con vida».

It's odd to spend your vacation with someone else's music especially when you're alone. You're free to let loose, unobserved, but someone else has chosen the words you belt out in private, the rythms you can dance to like a fool.

What, exactly, is a father if not a man who, once you're grown and gone and out in the world making your own mistakes, all good advice be damned, waits patiently for you to return? And if you don't, well then, you don't. He understands that risk. He knows whose choice it is.

I don't think I'll be getting married. - Cat

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).

and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.

We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.

It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature).

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.

Nothing else mattered. Of course there was "the rest of my life," both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that's not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn't. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though "sacrifice" implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss.

He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.

If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. —

Ragana, pagalvojau. Jeigu pasaulyje yra moteris, kuri? gali ?simyl?ti ir vis tiek manyti, kad gyvenimo verta atsisakyti, tai toji moteris yra Veronika.

A woman's right to choose — yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man's right to be consulted.

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. Julian Barnes - The Only Story