Quotes About Choice

Granted, we never gave you a choice, but wouldn't you have agreed to transfer those dreams to us, knowing now what you could not know then? This sort of subjunctive calculus, nobody teaches in school. Artificial sleep, for example, "sleep for all"—who can say if we will achieve it? I keep roto-dialing strangers, begging for their surplus unconsciousness.

Happiness is not about what happens to you, but how you choose to respond to what happens.

If someone doesn't like what you bring to the table in a relationship, let them eat alone.

Thoughts are like a steering wheel

The Bible tells me that "every good and perfect gift is from the Lord." I believe it. But, unlike things like stress and calories, these good gifts really are optional—I can choose to push them away, or I can embrace them with open arms. I wonder how many good gifts I've left unopened because I was too stressed, harried, or just plain shortsighted to recognize them for what they were?

When I'm hurting, it feels good to laugh. This is because, when life gets tough, we have two choices: We can cry about it, or we can laugh, and laughing is easier on the mascara. Crying makes me look like a raccoon.

Because whether I live for another seventy years or another week, what's the point if I'm not living the life I want?

There is how we were before, and how we are now, and the time between is spent choosing which doors to open, and which to close.

I think we become good parents by either copying what our parents did or doing the opposite. The trick is in deciding which way you want to go.

Choosing is hard, but not choosing is, in my view, much more debilitating. Sitting in limbo – not fully in your marriage and not out of it, looking at piles of pictures sitting on the floor rather than displaying them on a wall, letting time pass in a job you don't love but are reluctant to leave – and the non-choices are what will eat away at you.

Choosing is about assessing what has the best chance of achieving your goal based on some combination of what you know and what's unclear. Knowing yourself – your goals, your values, your needs – is a level of self-awareness that creates the most solid foundation possible for making choices.

I've got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.

You can only make decisions with the information you have at the time

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

Solitude would be ideal if you could pick the people to avoid.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it - Yogi Berra

Another recommendation has to do with balancing money and time. If you are willing to accept a lower income level, you can gain enormous benefits by choosing part-time work as a lifestyle.

It's a fact that life will hand us problems and difficulties—if that hasn't happened to you yet, you're lucky (and probably very young). Despite this fact, we all have the power to choose. We can make a conscious decision each day to embrace a positive attitude. It requires convincing yourself that you can wake up and decide to focus on positive emotions.

We do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

The future depends on ourselves, and we do not depend on any historical necessity.

a rational analysis of the consequences of a decision does not make the decision rational; the consequences do not determine our decision; it is always we who decide.

Democracy and freedom do not guarantee the millennium. No, we do not choose political freedom because it promises us this or that. We choose it because it makes possible the only dignified form of human coexistence, the only form in which we can be fully responsible for ourselves. Whether we realize its possibilities depends on all kinds of things — and above all on ourselves.

How often I have found that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every 'should' is a compulsion, and not every 'like' is a high morality and true freedom.