Quotes About Choice

he makes a vast contrast between nature, which is this elemental, capricious, perhaps causal, perhaps chance-directed entity, and man, who has morality, who distinguishes between desire and will, duty and interest, the right and the wrong, and acts accordingly, if need be against nature.

The mere existence of alternatives is not . . . enough to make my action free.

I più celebrati utopisti dei tempi moderni... offrono un quadro pressochè statico degli attributi essenziali dell'uomo e, di conseguenza, una descrizione altrettanto statica della società perfetta ritenuta raggiungibile. Con ciò essi ignorano il carattere degli uomini in quanto esseri che si autotrasformano, che sono capaci di libere scelte - entro i limiti imposti dalla natura e dalla storia - fra scopi contrastanti e reciprocamente incompatibili.

Creer en el determinismo entrañaría una aterradora pérdida de los conceptos con que discutimos la moral, por ejemplo, el elogio, la censura, el lamento o el perdón.

For Rousseau), the ancient conflict (between liberty and authority) is to be resolved by breeding a race of men who will choose absolutely freely only that which is absolutely right.... there would be no conflict, no agony, no choice.

We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail irreparable loss.

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

La parola "libertà" è uno degli indici più sicuri per individuare l'ideale di vita ultimativo e generale abbracciato dall'uomo che la usa, per capire ciò che vuole e che non vuole, e se quell'ideale egli lo sta perseguendo consciamente o inconsciamente.

I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?

This is how things come to pass in the world,' one of the princes is supposed to have said. 'Blood flows one way in life and another way in song, and one never knows which flow is the right one.

I would never exhange safety for freedom, regardless or the danger. I had the right to risk my life as I chose. -Chapter 21, page 247

It would be a little late in deciding now that we would not live our lives by the whimsical wisdoms of futuretellers, don't you think? [Chapter 33, page 386]

You simply can't make someone love you if they don't. You must choose someone who already loves you. If you choose someone who does not love you, this is the sort of love you must want.

Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.

When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusk-pulp, damp and happy.

Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

Decide for yourself. Everybody reacts in a different way.

La fantasia è una specie di macchina elettronica che tiene conto di tutte le combinazioni possibili e sceglie quelle che rispondono ad un fine, o che semplicemente sono le più interessanti, piacevoli, divertenti.

When I got here my first thought was: Maybe I achieved such an effort with my thoughts that time has made a complete revolution; here I am at the station from which I left on my first journey, it has remained as it was then, without any change. All the lives that I could have led begin here; there is the girl who could have been my girl and wasn't, with the same eyes, the same hair...

Of course, if I chose to be an optimist, there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.

Perché ogni scelta ha un rovescio cioè una rinuncia, e così non c'è differenza tra l'atto di scegliere e l'atto di rinunciare.

There are books I find likable, and books I can't bear, and I keep coming across them.

For Kundera, the weight of living is found in all types of restriction, in the dense network of public and private restrictions that ultimately envelops every life in ever-tighter bonds. His novel shows us how everything in life that we choose and value for its lightness quickly reveals its own unbearable heaviness. Perhaps