Quotes About Choice

Rather than freedom from traditional constraints, then, girls were free to choose them. Yet, the line between get to and have to blurs awfully fast.

When you're talking about over 26,000 items - and that's just Disney - it's a little hard to say where want ends and coercion begins.

To my knowledge, not one single pregnant delivery room nurse ever chose to go to him for care – and that speaks volumes.

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

A Native American grandfather was speaking to his grandson about violence and cruelty in the world and how it comes about. He said it was as if two wolves were fighting in his heart. One wolf was vengeful and angry, and the other wolf was understanding and kind. The young man asked his grandfather which wolf would win the fight in his heart. And the grandfather answered, "The one that wins will be the one I choose to feed.

nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject.

Whatever you're given can wake you up or put you to sleep. That's the challenge of now: What are you going to do with what you have already—your body, your speech, your mind?

Everything in our lives can wake us up or put us to sleep, and basically it's up to us to let it wake us up.

What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.

We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same. Right

When I realize I'm triggered, I think of it as a neutral moment, a moment in time, a moment of truth that can go either way. What I'm advocating is that in that precious moment we start to make choices that lead to happiness and freedom rather than choices that lead to unnecessary suffering and the obscuration of our intelligence, our warmth, our capacity to remain open and present with the natural movement of life.

It's up to you how to use your life. It doesn't mean that you have to be the best one at cheering up, or that your habitual tendencies never get the better of you. It just has to do with this sense of reminding yourself.

In My Stroke of Insight, the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. One and a half minutes, that's all. When it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it.

We can make ourselves miserable or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same.

we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice. If

You may very well have good reasons for resentment, frustration and anger. But that doesn't mean those negative responses are good for you, or that you must choose them.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

Any argument where one supposes an arbitrary choice to be made an uncountably infinite number of times ...[is] outside the domain of mathematics.

If you want a good argument against democracy, spend five minutes with a voter.

The fact that something can be used for good isn't necessarily a knockdown argument for it.

The humanitarian argument is so selective I find it difficult to swallow. It's not even so much about the choice as to where we should get involved and where we shouldn't.

If you know the why, you can live any how.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.