Quotes About Choice

Friendship is a delightful thing when you have had the good judgment to choose the right friends.

love. It was good to do with it, but also good to be able to do without

I am like a man who looks at one side of a coin and then at the other, and they are different, and he can't decide which is the coin. I see co-operation, and that delights me; then I see repression, and that repels me. Which is the coin?

no use to say it, for people didn't want to believe it and they knew how to believe what they chose.

Which is better, to vote for what you want and can't get, or to vote for what you don't want and get it?

The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn. David Russell

She seemed to represent a conscious choice between (1) a healthy, strong future of thriving and surviving and (2) a slothful existence of inactivity, illness, decline, and dependence.

I don't want to be told that it's the people with power over us who are guilty, that we're innocent slaves, that we're not guilty because we're not free. I am free! I'm building a Vernichtungslager; I have to answer to the people who'll be gassed here. I can say No. There's nothing can stop me—as long as I can find the strength to face my destruction.

Freedom is the direct opposite of necessity; freedom is necessity overcome.

The only way love can be shown in this world is by sacrifice —namely, the surrender of one thing for another. Love is essentially bound up with choice, and choice is a negation, and negation is a sacrifice. When a young man sets his heart upon a young woman and asks her to marry him, he is not only saying "I choose you"; he is also saying "I do not choose, I reject, all others. I give them all up for you." Apply this to the problem of lust.

The choice was whether to be sad and foolish or sad and reasonable.

Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we've lived — not whether we've been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities, what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger.

The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity...

When we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. _________ Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth...In fact freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.

I would rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.

I'd rather be the head of a fly than the tail of a lion.

He had, they said, tasted in succession all the apples of the tree of knowledge, and, whether from hunger or disgust, had ended by tasting the forbidden fruit.

Should he remain in paradise and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?

Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy. Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass.

Was there a voice that whispered in his ear that he had just passed the most solemn moment of his destiny, that there was no longer a middle course for him; that from now on, he would either be the best of men or he would be the worst of men; that he now had to rise higher, so to speak, than the bishop or fall even lower than the galley slave; that if he wanted to be good, he had to be an angel; that if he wanted to stay bad, he had to be a monster from hell?

For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we should choose the barbarians.

When all was said, his fate, however ugly it might prove to be, was in his own hands; he was its master.