Quotes About Choice

what makes a story unique is not necessarily the information in the story but what the writer chooses to put in or leave out.(pg. 146-147)

Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking. —ANTONIO MACHADO, CANTARES

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own

There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.

Bir kimsenin ancak sorumlu oldu?u ölçüde özgür olabilece?i paradoksu özgürlü?ün her noktas?nda merkezdedir. Fakat aksi de do?rudur. Bir kimse ancak özgür oldu?unda sorumlu olabilir.

But no values are effective, in a person or a society, except as there exists in the person the prior capacity to do the valuing, that is, the capacity actively to choose and affirm the values by which he lives. This the individual must do, and in this way he will help lay the groundwork for the new constructive society which will eventually come out of this disturbed time, as the Renaissance came out of the disintegration of the Middle Ages.

A] man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

namely that man does not grow automatically like a tree, but fulfills his potentialities only as he in his own consciousness plans and chooses.

Look, what do you think it matters to me, all that - all that business of - of the body? Do you suppose I actually picked you, of my own free will? As if I'd gone out shopping and decided you were the best buy for the money? I had no choice at all... You're you, and there's no one, nothing else. We talk about 'falling' in love. Well, I 'fell.

I'm a lousy housewife, Marc, and do I know it. Why didn't you pick yourself a nice little French girl who cooks?" "Because you don't pick and choose in love, honey. When it hits you in the right way it's almost always with the wrong woman.

Life is never too short, we just don't do what we want with it.

In the boundaryless forests, there're dancers of nude. Yet in the confines of pasture, there's promise of food. On which is your side? Ô, but tarry and bide, ere you decide, in both do confide.

A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.

To stop at moral judgement on whether caste was good or evil is insufficient, as the assessment has to go much further and examine why this form of discrimination/organization was chosen.

Survival is an instinct, not a choice.

The problem isn't with the choices made by central bankers. The problem is that they possess the power to make any choice at all.

To decrease the frequency and magnitude of war, those who are conditioned to die in them or pay for them are the ones who must decide they will neither support the wars nor be victimized by them.

I don't even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn't choose right, and she hadn't, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you're swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive. (83)

We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology.

I'd rather do a really good small part than a really bad big part.

While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs.