Quotes About Choice

My brother was one of the bigger influences in my life, in as much as he told me I didn't have to read the choice of books that I as recommended at school, and that I could go out to the library and go and choose my own, and sort of introduced me to authors that I wouldn't have read.probably. You know, the usual things like the Jack Kerouacs, the Ginsbergs, the ee Cummings and stuff.

All sooners know life is something you just borrow for a while. Each person must choose how to spend it.

Nothing is beyond us, the new legends say. So choose well.

Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that's solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn't an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.

If marriage is about deciding to love on a daily basis, I have woken up to a no-brainer every day since.

In the version of democracy that we are all used to, every five years or so we enter a voting booth and choose a politician from the mostly narrow choice of political parties presented to us in general elections. We then let the victor get on with ruling over us until the next time the parties want our votes.

Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.

I believe, as many say they believe, that everyone has the right to run his own life—to go to hell in his own fashion.

You may make the right decision or the wrong one, but whatever happens, it is your best shot, and you will strengthen your capacity for future action.

just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

What you have to decide is whether you should do something, not whether you can do it.

Is it? If somebody forces you to do something and there's no possible way to avoid it, is it really sin?

Power is power, Garion. The results are the same. You don't have to hurt people if you don't want to.

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free.

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?

To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.

Be on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive.

David Foster Wallace

Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how & what you think. It means being conscious & aware enough to choose what you pay attention to & to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

So which is the lie? Hard or soft? Silence or time?

There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.