Quotes About Choice

It's about 65 degrees, so it feels like when the air conditioner is up on high. I can bear it, so I'm going for a walk. Today. Right now. In the sunshine. Because I can. Because I want to. Because I'm not going to just sit around and wait for stuff to happen anymore. I'm still me, and I have a life. It's a weird life, but it's still mine. It's still mine.

Responsibility is something you actively agree to.

You have the right not to take on a responsibility for an impossible situation

careful deliberation. Parties on all sides agreed that whichever way the president came down, the implications were sure to be momentous. In fact, however, even as Obama pondered the question of whether to send ten thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand or forty thousand additional reinforcements to Afghanistan, the actual ability to exercise choice had already passed from his hands. In essence, the president found himself in the position of a man shopping

Notice how Christ uses that word deny twice. He said to Peter the first time, "Deny himself" (Matthew 16:24); He said to Peter the second time, "Thou shalt deny me" (Matthew 26:34). It is either of the two. There is no other choice for us; we must either deny self or deny Christ. There are two great powers fighting each other the self-nature in the power of sin, and Christ in the power of God. Either of these must rule within us.

Betwixt the life of feeling and the life of faith the Christian has to choose every day. Happy is he who, once for all, has made the firm choice, and every morning renews the choice, not to seek or listen for feeling, but only to walk by faith, according to the will of God.

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose. A mindset so UnitedStatesian, you could serve it with ketchup. But, friends, you cannot live on ketchup.

Why didn't he say yes? Freddy's voice from the past: You want me to stay here with you forever? Why didn't he say yes?

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what? Everything changes and this one fucking time, you're in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that's fine! That's fine! But choose.

Why didn't he say yes?

All I wanted was love. A simple thing, a timeless thing. When men want love they sing for it, or smile for it, or pay for it. And what do women do? They choose. And their lives are struck like bronze medallions. So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?

This is once-in-a-lifetime suffering and pain and heartache and yet it may be your only chance to decide what you really want. None of this I don't want to change bullshit. Hell no—you've changed. That's happened. Now what?

I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.

There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.

I was walking down the street today," she said, "and I thought, I am probably dying. And then I thought, should we have cherries or pears at lunch? And the two things felt too much the same.

We all face the prospect that what is supposed to be a private decision—the termination of a pregnancy—might become the first step in a campaign to eliminate people with disabilities.

Some opponents of (cochlear) implants have proposed that people make their own choice when they turn eighteen. Even putting aside the neural issues that make this impractical, it is a flawed proposition. At eighteen, you are choosing not simply between being deaf and being hearing, but between the culture you have known and the life you have not.

Thinking seems to me less persuasive evidence of being than does choosing. Not in our chemistry and not in circumstance does our humanity lie, but in our will to work with the technologies available to us through the era in which we live, through our own character, through our circumstances and age.

Rather darkness than the illumination of the unclean.

Just as the only real antidote to the temptations of money is lavish generosity, so the only real antidote to the temptations of power is choosing to spend our power in the opposite of the way the world encourages us to spend it: not on getting closer to the sources of additional power or on securing our own round-the-clock sense of comfort and control, but spend it on getting closer to the relatively powerless.

Our individual loneliness, our anxiety, our depression, our broken and disappointed families, our fractured communities, are not what they are because of some choice we could easily unmake or remake.

But it is certainly true that in the long run that choice is up to us: what we ask our technology to do, what we ask its designers to optimize, what we believe is the good life that we are pursuing together.

Why do people spend their time being sad when they could be happy?