Quotes About Choice

Free will is a gift. Love is a choice. Hate leaves you no choice at all.

Chance disappears when you make a decision.

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple.

And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.

There are not many road signs in Russia, you know. He laughed. If you don't know where the road goes, you shouldn't be on it.

Use this advice to prod your thinking, but don't use it as a replacement for your thinking. In the end you have to make, and live with, the decisions yourself.

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

You make me sick! You are offered meat and you choose a banana-split-with-nuts.

A man may be born a jackass; but it is his business if he makes himself a double one.

Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals prefer life in the mud to life in clear water.

Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Anthony, do you want a police force or a campaign ad?

If most of the time they do and feel and think and watch and eat and drink precisely what everyone else does, are Americans really free? There

If someone throws herself off a tall building, it may make sense to employ Newtonian physics in order to explain her immediate prospects. But it is also quite obvious that this explanation fails to address other important questions which we may wish to ask about that person's life and fate.

The will is a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills Nor can it choose its rider... the riders contend for its possession.

For all works and things, which are either commanded or forbidden by God and thus have been instituted by the supreme Majesty, are 'musts.' Nevertheless, no one should be dragged to them or away from them by the hair, for I can drive no man to heaven or beat him into it with a club.

I frankly confess that even if it were possible I should not wish to have free choice given to me, or to have anything left in my own hands by which I might strive for salvation.

I owe you a small thanks, for you have made me far more sure of my own position by letting me see the case for free choice put forward with all the energy of so distinguished and powerful a mind, but with no other effect than to make things worse than before.

what is sought by means of free choice is to make room for merits.

Now I know from this very word and deed of yours what free choice is and is capable of, namely, madness.

I will say something still easier. Take a single flea or louse-since you tempt and mock our God with this talk about curing a lame horse-and if, after combining all the powers and concentrating all the efforts both of your good and all your supporters, you succeed in killing it in the name of free choice, you shall be victorious, your case shall be established, and we too will come at once and worship that god of yours, that wonderful killer of the louse.

If then, Moses so distinctly announces that there is in us not only a faculty, but also a facility for keeping all commandments, why are we sweating so much? ... What need is there now of Christ or of Spirit? We have found a passage that asserts freedom of choice, but also distinctly teaches that the keeping of the commandments is easy.

It seems we must choose between Christ and the Pope. Let the Pope perish.