Quotes About Choice

Love is a mystery. We embrace it where we can. Mostly we do not choose whom we love. It just happens. A voice speaks to us, in ways the ears cannot hear. We recognize a beauty the eye does not see. We experience a change in our hearts that no voice can describe.

But you, your life, it's just starting, it's all ahead of you. It's yours to throw away.

Choisir un film pour quelqu'un est une chose risquée. En un sens, c'est aussi révélateur que de lui écrire une lettre. Ça expose notre façon de penser, ça parle de ce qui nous émeut, ça peut même parfois exhiber la façon dont nous pensons être perçu par le monde.

Capitalism, he noted, is not something imposed on us by some outside force. It only exists because every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn't have capitalism anymore.

Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it's just randomness.

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Increasingly, it's looking like we have no other choice.

John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it's really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn't be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.

we are all in the situation of the inmate who prefers working in the prison laundry to sitting in the cell watching TV all day.

What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in 'Western civilization,' only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.27

For a very long time, the intellectual consensus has been that we can no longer ask Great Questions. Incearingly, it's looking like we have no other choice.

the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

I was once again doing something I didn't want to do, and once again I didn't know why. I was leaving the beach to drive back "home" where it was cold and wet. While the mountainous city of Asheville was certainly a beautiful place, I felt better near the ocean. I'm not saying the ocean is better than mountains, fields, cities, rivers, or anywhere else; the ocean was simply my preference.

Hoe zei jij dat ook alweer, over de wrede keuze: de woordeloosheid levend en levendig houden, of onder woorden brengen.

Pain is mandatory. Suffering is optional.

The ocean is a dangerous place, but it's also a place you can still go and have to yourself, a place that's clean and, yes, wild. If you go into the ocean you're making a choice. You need to know you can drown, you can get lost, or you can be eaten by great beasts.

There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.

Men often act knowingly against their interest.

Scepticism may be theoretically irrefutable, but even the sceptic must 'act … and live, and converse, like other men', since human nature gives him no choice.

Tis not unreasonable for me to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition. Mirth or passion, sentiment or reflection; whichever of these most predominates in our temper, it gives us a peculiar sympathy with the writer who resembles us.

There is no such thing as freedom of choice unless there is freedom to refuse.

No man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see the real you, or what you have been conditioned to believe is you? The two are so, so different. One is an infinite consciousness capable of being and creating whatever it chooses, the other is an illusion imprisoned by its own perceived and programmed limitations.