Quotes About Choice

I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking.

Yes,' he answered; 'and you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.

A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him…. The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.

He had come to think that so long as a man wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no further, then it is not the way.

From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.

It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated. [13]

Spiritual Murder It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.

Impossibilities "I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too."—"No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it.

To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness.

Hell The one principle of hell is—"I am my own!

I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too."—"No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it.

The fault lay with those who had brought him up to the church as to the profession of medicine, or the bar, or the drapery business—as if it lay on one level of choice with other human callings.

To be, or not to be, that is the Question:

The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.

The truth is this: He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How should he effect this if he were always moving us from within, as he does at divine intervals, towards the beauty of holiness? God gives us room to be; does not oppress us with his will; "stands away from us," that we may act from ourselves, that we may exercise the pure will for good.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.

Comrade, said Snowball, those ribbons that you are so devoted to are the badge of slavery. Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons? Mollie agreed, but she did not sound very convinced.

Much better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.

There it lay, fixed in future time, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, willful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness and for the bulk of mankind happiness was better.

Their job seemed to me so hopeless, so appalling that I wondered how anyone could put up with such a thing when prison was a possible alternative.