Quotes About Choice

One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

Still, if you gave me the choice of having any woman you care to name, but I mean any woman, or catching a ten-pound carp, the carp would win every time.

If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens , I should say that Tolstoy's appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose.

Don't let it happen, it's up to you

And it was a queer thing I'd done coming here.

Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next. And the enormous majority of human beings, if they understood the issue, would choose this world. They do make that choice when they continue working, breeding and dying instead of crippling their faculties in the hope of obtaining a new lease of existence elsewhere.

He was not certain that he would use the razor blade even if he got the chance. It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.

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

The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever before—freedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high, marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business, have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and boast about it, fail abjectly and try again.

My first judgment is my best. Yet always have I found it difficult to compel myself to proceed with a good bargain when made.

A bag heavy with gold or a clay tablet carved with words of wisdom; if thou hadst thy choice, which wouldst thou choose?

Have I the soul of a slave or the soul of a free man?

If wisely chosen as to their usefulness and value in the future, they are permanent in their value

MEN OF ACTION ARE FAVORED BY THE GODDESS OF GOOD LUCK     The Five Laws of Gold     A bag heavy with gold or a clay tablet carved with words of wisdom; if thou hadst thy choice, which wouldst thou choose?     By the flickering light from the fire of desert shrubs, the sun-tanned faces of the listeners gleamed with interest.     The gold, the gold, chorused the twenty-seven.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn't so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Mr. A calls me into his office and says he's got bad news and bad news, and which do I want first. I say the bad news.

When we find our voice, what's really happening is that we're choosing a voice from among the many voices we're able to do, and we're choosing it beacuse we've found that, of all the voices we contain, it's the one, so far, that has proven itself to be the most energetic.

All men labor under some impingements on their freedom; none is absolutely at liberty.

I teach "The Singers" to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we'll turn out to be.

In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.

How could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and our experience up until that moment.

A train approaches a wall at a fatal rate of speed. You hold a switch in your hand, that accomplishes you know not what: do you throw it? Disaster is otherwise assured. It costs you nothing. Why not try?

We were as we were" …"how could we have been otherwise? Or, being that way, have done otherwise? We were that way, at that time, and had been led to that place, not by any innate evil in ourselves, but by the state of our cognition and experience up until that moment

Our path is not for everyone. Many people—I do not mean to disparage them? Lack the necessary resolve.