Quotes About Choice

In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want.

Some people choose "to go to college" rather than choose "to be educated", or choose "to eat health foods" rather than choose "to be healthy." Because this kind of choice invests undue power in the process, the result is inextricably tied to the process, and the ways in which the desired result can come about are limited.

Secondary choices are always subordinate to a primary choice. Often there is no reason to make such choices outside the context of the primary choice that calls for them. Athletes and musicians may not enjoy practicing long hours, but they do so just the same; not out of duty, obligation, or any other form of self-manipulation, but because they are making secondary choices consistent with their primary choice to be able to perform music or excel at sports.

In the orientation of the creative, once you have consciously made the choice to be healthy and you are attracted to eating certain foods and following certain forms of exercise, you are involved in an organic process. The structural tendency of this organic process is for you to be attracted to those processes that will be particularly beneficial to your health. Those processes might include the usual, expected ones, such as health food and exercise, as well as unexpected ones.

Often, the person reaches a point where there is a choice between two conflicting interests: reducing the emotional discomfort or seeing what is really going on. The person needs to make a value choice at this point. Which is more important to you, seeing reality or feeling okay? Almost always, the person chooses to see reality, and therefore, to let the emotional chips fall wherever they may.

When you merely choose a process, you do not establish structural tension, and you do not make energy available to complete the creative process.

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances.

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.

I shall set forth for somewhere,I shall make the reckless choiceSome say when they are in voiceAnd tossing so as to scareThe white clouds over them on,I shall have less to say,But I shall be gone.

I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well.

I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not.

Now and then some one says that the religion of his father and mother is good enough for him, and wonders why anybody should desire a better. Surely we are not bound to follow our parents in religion any more than in politics, science or art.

while life has but one entrance, it has exits innumerable, and as I choose the house in which I live, the ship in which I will sail, so will I choose the time and manner of my death.

man has the right to stop the pulse of pain and woo the sleep that has no dream.

When a man is of no use to himself or to others, when his days and nights are filled with pain and sorrow, why should he remain to endure them longer?

To accomplish this there is but one way. Science must make woman the owner, the mistress of herself. Science, the only possible savior of mankind, must put it in the power of woman to decide for herself whether she will or will not become a mother.

Sense entered into a short, violent skirmish with instinct and inclination, and was overwhelmed.

Strike looked down at his own plate: where there should have been chips, there was only salad.

Where was her red line?

He knew that his personal tipping point was drawing nearer; that moment by which, unless he left, he would find it too onerous to go, to readjust to

Why complicate your life when it did not need complicating, when you had a choice?