Quotes About Choice

She wondered if she'd taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it.

Happiness is not given to us, nor is misery imposed. At every moment we are at a crossroads and must choose the direction we will take.

People were always saying to Margaret, 'Well, Julia sings and Betsy writes. Now what is little Margaret going to do?' Margaret would smile politely, for she was very polite, but privately she stormed to Betsy with flashing eyes, 'I'm not going to do anything. I want to just live. Can't people just live?

twenty-eight years old, getting elective surgery

We have two candidates with the highest unfavorables ever recorded and a majority of voters who feel stuck voting against, rather than for, someone. Both parties nominated the only person who could possibly lose to the other. Voters are agonizing about whether they can trust either candidate.

it seems to me suicide is its own kind of 'death in battle,' and it may stand in for all our sufferings... People commit suicide when they are at war with sadness, or fear, or loneliness, or pain. When a single blow seems preferable to daily assault. Suicide is not heroic, nor romantic, nor idealistic, but neither is it cowardly or sinful. Made in a fit of passion or very deliberately, it is a choice. [Édouard Manet]

The funny thing about stop signs is that they're also start signs.

Look! A riddle! Time for fun! Should we use a rope or gun? Knives are sharp and gleam so pretty Poison's slow, which is a pity Fire is festive, drowning's slow Hanging's a ropy way to go A broken head, a nasty fall A car colliding with a wall Bombs make a very jolly noise Such ways to punish naughty boys! What shall we use? We can't decide. Just like you cannot run or hide. Ha ha. Truly, Devious

Midnight falls when the dice are cast, but one can only cast the dice at Midnight.

Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative.

On lui donnait le moyen de se sauver seul. Tout homme sensé, à qui l'on fait une proposition de cette sorte, la considère, et n'en a que plus de mérite lorsqu'il la repousse. (Le roi de fer, partie 3, ch. 6, p. 322)

El dolor es inevitable, el sufrimiento es opcional.

Of what avail are my loftiest thoughts if I have ceased to exist?" there are some will ask; to whom others, it may be, will answer, "What becomes of myself if all that I love in my heart and my spirit must die, that my life may be saved?" And are not almost all the morals, and heroism, and virtue of man summed up in that single choice?

Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.

It is the unconscious which chooses what aspect of us will be admitted to official existence.

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

Those who resisted were neither madmen nor wise men; they were heroes—men in whom passion and reason were identical, who in the obscurity of desire did what history expected and what was later to appear as the truth of the moment. We cannot remove the element of reason in their choice any more than the element of audacity and risk of failure.

There is no freedom without a field.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.

do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation arising to evolution. —George Wald, Chemist and Nobel Prize winner for medicine

A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.

Am I making this decision because it's smart or because a majority says it's smart?