Quotes About Choice

Let it go and Hold on! In the way of so many great philosophies, those apparent opposites prove to be two sides of the same coin. To hold securely to the well-formed purposes of your own will, you must let go of the vain idea that you can control people or events or the tides of fate. You can't change what was, nor entirely control what will be. But you can choose who you are and what you stand for and what you will try to accomplish.

Remember that just so much are you adding to the pleasure or misery of other people's days… Whether each day of your life shall give happiness or suffering rests with yourself. – George Merriam

Dying gloriously sounds good in bad historical novels. Speaking for myself, I think doing it in real life when you don't have to is fucking stupid, and it irritates the hell out of me that we don't appear to have any choice.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

Can you change something? If so, do it; if not, don't worry about it – it's that simple.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. —Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

He is on the precipice of cheating, maybe, which in itself is a kind of thrill for him, and yet, if he thinks about it too much he knows it is the same thing. On the precipice or over the precipice, once you're there, you're there.

No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

Fate isn't one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.

Inaction counted as a choice.

Don't tell me what's necessary, you presumptupus pup. What's necessary is whatever I wish to do, regardless of how unnecessary it might be.

If you're still, and if you don't hope too much, peace will come to you. It's a grace. But you have to choose happiness.

Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.

One door away from heaven And the key is ours to lose. One door away from heaven But oh, the entry dues.

Nothing is predetermined for us, and yet all our possible choices are threads in the vast weave of things, so that we have free will even though the consequences of our will are predictable.

We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which it must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness, and misery.

This time I would choose to err on the side of illogic. I had to trust intuition, and plunge as I had never plunged before, with blind faith.

Sometimes complex and difficult moral choices are decided less by reason and by right than by sentiment.

Lots of people are unable to see all kinds of truths right in front of their eyes. The world is what we make it, and our future is ours to shape.

Free will, she agreed, our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.

what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection. BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON Chapter 27 Page 214

I knew that suffering can purify, that it's a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself.

she'd known that being a victim was often a choice people made.