Quotes About Choice

My fresh perspective provided her with a new alternative that had always been available to her; she just wasn't seeing it.

Fairies have to be one thing or the other, because being so small they unfortunately have room for one feeling only at a time.

We may be as good as we please, if we please to be good.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "How in a free country such as this, can we ban video games and golf, yet continue to permit stamp collecting?"

It's not an easy choice, but that's OK. Easy doesn't equal good. Difficulty doesn't equal bad. It's just life, is all.

You don't swing at any pitch. You swing at the ones you can hit.

I'm not sure which is worse--being born to it or learning it.

All I have to do is wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, Jazz. Everything else is optional.

A significant event in your life, and what you would or would not change about it. A significant event in your life. And what you would. Or would not. Change about it." Are you fucking kidding me? How about: not pulled the fucking trigger?

This is where. This is where it will happen. This is where I will do it. When the time comes. I've fired a gun once in my life. I'll do it again. When the time comes.

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.

Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.

The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.

choose less and feel better.

On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.

The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don't exist—alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

What we don't realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds.

Knowing that you've made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.

Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.

But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.

Pay attention to what you're giving up in the next-best alternative, but don't waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn't have gotten to anyway.

The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .