Quotes About Choice

even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don't approve of abortion? Don't have one. Don't approve of gay marriage? Don't have one. Don't approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ's sake, don't have one. But don't tell me I can't have one - each and every one - because it offends your God.

The GAP is a habit. It's a habit we can fall into literally hundreds of times per day. We can spend hours each day in the GAP—unhappy, resentful, regretful.

What if we had walked a different path one day, would some small incident have nudged us elsewhere the way a pebble tossed into a brook might change the course a hundred miles downstream?

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

And saying yes to this version of her life would mean saying no to another version of her life.

He didn't even have a chance . . . no, he had only one chance, and he gave it to me.

I hate the idea of "resolutions." When we make a resolution, we try to plan out the next month or the next year. It's a total trap. We can't control what's going to happen down the road; pledging to go to the gym four days a week or to never eat chocolate cake for a year is just a recipe for failure. So forget the future; just make the next healthy choice for yourself right now.

Daniel Alejandro Valdes

Simple, humble spaces help focus attention on the deep-practice task at hand: reaching and repeating and struggling. When given the choice between luxurious and spartan, choose spartan. Your unconscious mind will thank you.

As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they know only their own side of the question.

when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes.

As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart's admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life.

Stuart Mill wrote, 'It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."14

The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.

Temporal landmarks slow our thinking, allowing us to deliberate at a higher level and make better decisions

maybe those decisions were bad because he made them in the afternoon

Foundation regrets arise from our failures of foresight and conscientiousness. Like all deep structure regrets, they start with a choice. At some early moment, we face a series of decisions. One set represents the path of the ant. These choices require short-term sacrifice, but in the service of a long-term payoff. The other choices represent the path of the grasshopper. This route demands little exertion or assiduousness in the short run, but risks exacting a cost in the long run.

Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice," they write, "whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.

Think of this book as a new genre altogether—a when-to book.

Hay personas que prefieren decir "Sí", y hay otras que prefieren decir "No" —escribe Keith Johnstone—. Las que dicen "Sí" obtienen la recompensa de las aventuras que viven. Las que dicen "No" tienen su recompensa en la seguridad que obtienen.»

One of the most robust findings, in the academic research and my own, is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn't take than the chances we did.

We're born to be players, not pawns.