Quotes About Choice

His life has never rested on anything he has known beforehand — none of it. He chose it before he knew it, and again afterwards.

Mattie was a grown woman in love, and they had to let her go, with their blessing, enduring what could not be helped. And there was no use in thinking of that fluid, glistening instant that always seems, in looking back, to have come between what might have happened and what happened, when one might have made some little choice that would have changed forever the course of things.

In choosing what is difficult we are free, the mind too making its little flight out from the shadow into the clear in time between work and sleep.

Although we cannot command it, we choose joy, making a deliberate commitment to happiness (essentially another word for peace).

You have to choose your combinations careful. The right choices will enhance your quilt. The wrong choices will dull the colors and hide their original beauty. There are no rules you can follow. You have to go by instinct and you have to be brave.

Never choose a battle; only fight if you cannot walk away.

I need a road." Isazi shrugged. "The one to the north is no longer or harder than the road to the south.

Reported as Oscar Wilde's last words on his death bed... This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.

you are so much better off as a single woman – unless – unless you are very fond of your husband …

The only hope I have left for you hangs on a great doubt - the doubt whether we are, or are not, the masters of our own destinies. It may be that mortal free-will can conquer mortal fate; and that going, as we all do, inevitably to death, we go inevitably to nothing that is before death.

Let the end come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it: here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and security - a moral agriculturist, with his eye on two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready for any emergency. For the next week to come, the newspaper will be more interesting to me than ever. I wonder which side I shall eventually belong to?

When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.

This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down?

Spinoza compares the feeling of free will to a stone's thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall.

You know it's Sunday because no one in their right mind would ever opt for Zaxby's over Chick-fil-A unless it were Sunday and they had no choice.

When we behave badly, it is usually because we were put in an unhappy situation. Circumstance has conspired against us. Really, I had no choice. When others do wrong, it is because of their character flaws.

Better to shun the bait than struggle in the snare.

Make your own rules or be a slave to another man's.

Do what you will, this life's a fiction, And it is made up of contradiction.

Active evil is better than passive good

As the caterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys

No, no - you have to understand, Lysander, here in Vienna, in this ramshackle empire of ours, suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action. Everyone will know your true feelings and why you had no choice but to do it - no one will condemn you or blame you.

You know that feeling, when you can almost see the two or several directions your life might take ahead of you, a moment when you know that the next choice you are about to make is going to be crucial and possibly final, that there is no going back, and that nothing will ever be the same again?