choices Quotes

“Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”

“The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”

“When things don’t go right, go left.”

“Authenticity is a collection of choices that we have to make every day. It’s about the choice to show up and be real. The choice to be honest. The choice to let our true selves be seen.”

“I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors –”

“Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!”

“When I left Queen’s my future seemed to stretch out before me like a straight road. I thought I could see along it for many a milestone. Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla.”

“Which would you rather be if you had the choice--divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good?”

“I can’t live a life torn between that which exists—and you.”

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”

“Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

“It was as simple as that. Once he had yearned for choice. then, when he had had a choice, he had made the wrong one: the choice to leave. And now he was starving. But if he had stayed... His thoughts continued. If he had stayed, he would have starved in other ways. He would have lived a life hungry for feelings, for color, for love.”

Two things cannot be in one place. “Where, you tend a rose, my lad / A thistle cannot grow.”

“It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?”

“What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And chose wrong?”

“Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, “Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?”

“Every day you’re choosing who you are and what you believe about yourself, and you’re setting the standards for the relationships in your life. Every day is a chance to start over.”

“If everything’s the same, then there aren’t any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!”

“You always have a choice. It’s just that some people make the wrong one.”

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”

“I’m just going to do what I want now, and let the chips fall where they may.”

“With all the risks they were taking, love was probably the most dangerous choice of all.”

“A person may dislike his choice, but he will stand by it because, even in the worst circumstances, he believes that it was the best option available to him at the time.”

“You only get one life. It’s actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”

“For her, choices were simple; either there was an action she could take to improve the situation, in which case she took it, or there was not, and everything else said on the subject was so much meaningless noise.”

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”

“Your life is your party. You get to choose how you invite people and experiences and things into it.”

“She had a lot of confidence, and, as long as it wasn’t me forcing it on her, she loved a challenge.”

“Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children’s own desires and preferences.”

″‘You are fettered,’ said Scrooge, trembling. ‘Tell me why?’ ‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?‘”

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”

“With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet, you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good street.”

“Suffer love,--a good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.”

“There’s small choice in rotten apples.”

“Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.”

“Just because you have a choice, it doesn’t mean that any of them has to be right.”

“I always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.” “So as to do them?” asked her aunt. “So as to choose.” said Isabel”

“Kinder than is necessary. Because it’s not enough to be kind. One should be kinder than needed. Why I love that line, that concept, is that it reminds me that we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness.”

“When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose kind.”

“If you simply ignored the feeling, you would never know what might happen, and in many ways that was worse than finding out in the first place. Because if you were wrong, you could go forward in your life without ever looking back over your shoulder and wondering what might have been.”

If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.

If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?

“I just choose to be happy.”

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’—that gives a choice.”

You will find that you don’t need to trust others as much as you need to trust yourself to make the right choices.

“At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit’s idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.”

“Not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half.”

“A strong man cannot help a weaker unless the weaker is willing to be helped, and even then the weak man must become strong of himself; he must, by his own efforts, develop the strength which he admires in another. None but himself can alter his condition.”

“We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.”

“When you are choosing what to keep, ask your heart; when you are choosing where to store something, ask your house.”

“The “divinity that shapes our ends” is in ourselves;”

“But I will not stand in front of your happiness. I will not even stand in front of misery that you choose for yourself.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

“We are free to choose our paths, but we can’t choose the consequences that come with them.”

“If they were going to die in Japan, at least they could take a path that they and not their captors chose, declaring in this last act of life, that they remained sovereign over their own souls.”

’He pulled my curtain aside and looked across the street. “One’s character is set at any early age, son. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life.” He was quiet for a minute, then dropped the curtain and said, “I hate to see you swim out so far you can’t swim back.” ’

“I should’ve stepped in; fourth grade is no excuse. Besides, it doesn’t get easier with time, and twelve years later, when Vietnam presented much harder choices, some practice at being brave might’ve helped.”

″‘Here, we have two choices. To be together and miserable or to be together and happy. Mija, we have each other and Abuelita will come. How would she want you to behave? I choose to be happy. So which will you choose?‘”

“Psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’ when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.”

“We do not need to operate according to the idea of a predetermined program for our lives.”

“A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep… But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

“It was one thing to talk about being by yourself, doing important things, but quite another when the opportunity arose. The characters in the stories she read always seemed to go off without a thought or a care, but in real life—well, the world was a dangerous place. People were always telling her so.”

“Her joy on the road that morning had completely disappeared; the wide world shrank and her oldest fears rolled freely in her consciousness. It was unbelievable that she should be in this place; it was an outrage. But she was helpless to do anything about it, helpless to control it, and exhausted by the conversation in the rowboat.”

″‘I have a problem, Miss Everdeen,’ says President Snow. ‘A problem that began the moment you pulled out those poisonous berries in the arena.’ That was the moment when I guessed that if the Gamemakers had to choose between watching Peeta and me commit suicide – which would mean having no victor – and letting us both live, they would take the latter.”

“I been thinking it over. Pa’s right about you having to keep the secret. It’s not hard to see why. But the thing is, you knowing about the water already, and living right next to it so’s you could go there any time, well, listen, how’d it be if you was to wait till you’re seventeen, same age as me—heck, that’s only six years off—and then you could go and drink some, and then you could go away with me!”

“Her mother’s voice, the feel of home, receded for the moment, and her thoughts turned forward. Why, she, too, might live forever in this remarkable world she was only just discovering! The story of the spring—it might be true!”

“Believe me, Winnie Foster,” said Jesse, “it would be terrible for you if you drank any of this water. Just terrible. I can’t let you.”

“I saw clearly that so long as I was still a human being and not nothingness, I was alive and so could suffer, be angry and feel shame at my actions.”

“So we gave up. I’d finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We’d failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved.”

“Winnie looked at his young, strong face, and after a moment she said, “Why didn’t you take them to the spring and give them some of the special water?”

“There are times when we simply do not know what to do, or where to go, next. Sometimes these periods are brief, sometimes lingering. We can get through these times. We can rely on our program and the disciplines of recovery. We can cope by using our faith, other people, and our resources. Accept uncertainty. We do not always have to know what to do or where to go next. We do not always have clear direction. Refusing to accept the inaction and limbo makes things worse. It is okay to temporarily be without direction.”

“Say “I don’t know,” and be comfortable with that. We do not have to try to force wisdom, knowledge, or clarity when there is none. While waiting for direction, we do not have to put our life on hold. Let go of anxiety and enjoy life. Relax. Do something fun. Enjoy the love and beauty in your life. Accomplish small tasks. They may have nothing to do with solving the problem, or finding direction, but this is what we can do in the interim. Clarity will come. The next step will present itself. Indecision, inactivity, and lack of direction will not last forever.”

“Today, I will accept my circumstances even if I lack direction and insight. I will remember to do things that make myself and others feel good during those times. I will trust that clarity will come of its own accord.”

One of the few advantages man has over other animals is the ability to choose the way to bring on his own death.

“You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you’re choosing wrong.”

“I think you were just worried that if you really forced her to choose, she might not choose you.”

“Dinner was pizza, and even though it was homemade by her father [...] Coraline ate the entire slice she had been given. Well, she ate everything except for the pineapple chunks.”

″While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law….We can decide to step in front of a fast-moving train, but we cannot decide what will happen when the train hits us.″

“Nothing, thought Bruno, not even the insects, would ever choose to stay at Out-With.”

“Whenever you think you can or think you can’t, either way you are right.”

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

“‘Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you. Does that make any sense?’”

“Tomas suddenly realized that he was not at all sure he had made the proper choice, but he felt bound to it by then by an unspoken vow of fidelity, so he stood fast. And that is how he became a window washer.”

“Be industrious, let thine eyes be open, lest you become a beggar, for the man that is idle cometh not to honor.”

“We alternate choosing places to go, but we also have to be willing to go where the road takes us. This means the grand, the small, the bizarre, the poetic, the beautiful, the ugly, the surprising. Just like life.”

“I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate.

“I’m going. (He does not move).”

“The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. ”

“I believe that whatever you do in your life it will get back to you. If you live long enough it will. ”

“Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this.”

“Choices will continually be necessary and -- let us not forget -- possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”

″‘Everything I do is wrong. You think I don’t know that? I’ve screwed up my entire existence, and everyone who’s close to me gets screwed right along with me.‘”

“Sometimes if you have a difficult decision to make, just stall until the answer presents itself.”

“Ah! Why couldn’t you say so before? Why he doesn’t make himself comfortable? Let’s try and get this clear. Has he not the right to? Certainly he has. It follows that he doesn’t want to. There’s reasoning for you.”

“Moss walked out onto the prairie behind the motel with one of the motel pillows under his arm and he wrapped the pillow about the muzzle of the gun and fired off three rounds and then stood there in the cold sunlight watching the feathers drift across the gray chaparral, thinking about his life.”

“You dont start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away.”

“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways...and that way will come soon.”

“Dare not choose in your minds the work you would like to do when you leave the Home of the Students. You shall do that which the Council of Vocations shall prescribe for you.”

“Unlike money time comes to all of us in equal amounts. In fact, everyone has all the time there is—twenty-four hours a day. But what an astonishing variety in our use of that time and the results of our choices!

“Let us trust ourselves completely to make the choices we must make.”

“But your choices are also not stronger than my purposes, and I will use every choice you make for the ultimate good and the most loving outcome.”

“If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.”

“You make your choices, and then your choices make you.”

“If I take away the consequences of people’s choices, I destroy the possibility of love. Love that is forced is no love at all.”

“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”

“The two desires struggle within me: the desire to be safe, and the desire to know. I cannot tell which one will win.”

“Being with Ky, being with Xander—both things feel like standing in the light. Different types of light, but neither feels dark.”

“Every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.”

“It was as though for the first time I saw that life could branch into different paths, take different directions.”

“I feel like something is dying, ruined beyond repair. If the Officials orchestrated our whole love affair, the one thing I thought happened in spite of them…”

“I think people should be able to choose who they Match with,” I say lamely. “Where would it end, Cassia?” she says, her voice patient. “Would you say next that people should be able to choose how many children they have, and where they want to live? Or when they want to die?”

“It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance. What would it be like to know that you could never choose anything else?”

“We can’t choose our fate, but we can choose others. Be careful in knowing that.”

“Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.”

“Of his own choice, he came in to sit by man’s fire and to be ruled by him.”

″‘The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?’ ‘Choose a friend.’ I said.”

“We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.”

“I knew that Phoebe was convinced that her mother was kidnapped because it was impossible for Phoebe to imagine that her mother could leave for any other reason. I wanted to call Phoebe and say that maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it.”

“I have no choice,” he said again. “It’s like a dynasty. If the son doesn’t take the father’s place, the dynasty falls apart. The people expect me to be their rabbi. My family has been their rabbi for six generations now.”

“This short interval was sufficient to determine D’Artagnan on the part he was to take. It was one of those events which decide the life of a man; it was a choice between the king and the cardinal--the choice made, it must be persisted in.

“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”

″‘(A guardian ad litem is) a person trained to work with kids in the family court, who determines what’s in the child’s best interests,’ Anna recites. ‘Or in other words, just another grown-up deciding what happens to me.‘”

“You admitted that you’ve always considered Kate’s health, not Anna’s, in making these choices. ... So how can you claim to love them both equally? How can you say that you haven’t been favoring one child in your decisions?”

“A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”

“How very remorseful are you, who have accumulated evil! On this dangerous red passageway traversed by all, When you are brought to trial by the executors of Yama’s rites, even though you may have been once very powerful, here, it will be of no avail! Now is the time for the hearts and lungs of all great wrongdoers to be torn apart! Since you have practiced non-virtue, this reckoning of your past actions will be quicker and more powerful than lightning, so by fleeing you will not escape, and by showing remorse, this will be of no help! How pitiful are the human beings of Jambudvlpa who do not strive to practice the [sacred] teachings!”

“A major decision about me is being made, and no one’s bothered to ask the one person who most deserves it to speak her opinion.”

“It could have been so easy. I could have walked across the ice myself, without the burden of the group. They could have tried to save the blind girl. Maybe they all would have drowned in the process. That would have been so much easier. And so much harder.”

“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. ‘What if . . .’ ‘If only . . .’ ‘I wonder what would have . . .’ You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

“A calling implies I have a choice, doesn’t it? That I could answer the call, or not. That I have a choice in whether or not I accept this as my destiny? Well, I don’t. I don’t want anything to do with it. And I don’t accept the call. Matter of fact, this line is no longer in service. ”

“It meant a great deal to me that she chose a place beside me as opposed to a spot in the second row. She was faithful. She’d make a great queen.”

“Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.”

“Our acts can be no wiser than our thoughts.”

“People will judge you and your dreams. They’ll tell you you’re crazy and try to convince you that mediocrity is the smarter choice and that’s because it’s easier if you buy into the same lie they have, that no one person can really make a difference and that life is about ‘growing up’ instead of working toward your personally authored, happily ever after.”

“Some of those activities may be good, but they are taking up resources that your best ones need. So you always will have to choose between good and best. This is especially tough for some creative people, causing them a lack of focus. They create more than they can focus on and feed, they are attached to every idea as if they were all equal, and they try to keep them all alive. Instead of a to-do list, they have a to-do pile. It goes nowhere fast.”

“We need to understand that there is no formula for how women should lead their lives. That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential.”

“I do not want you to waste your life in dreams, like your father.”

“We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.”

“And that’s all we are, Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood, until we—each one of us, individually—decide to become something else.”

“Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.”

″‘Oh dear,’ said Lucy. ‘Have I spoiled everything? Do you mean we would have gone on being friends if it hadn’t been for this – and been really great friends – all our lives perhaps – and now we never shall.’ ‘Child,’ said Aslan, ‘did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what would have happened?‘”

“One of the greatest revelations of my life is: I can choose my thoughts and think things on purpose. In other words, I don’t have to just think about whatever falls into my mind.”

″‘We can never know,’ Simon answered slowly. ‘God hides the future from man’s eyes. We are forced to choose, not knowing. I have chosen Jesus.‘”

“We do not have to love. We choose to love. No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not loving, it is because we have chosen not to love and therefore do not love despite our good intentions.”

“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

“In the end, you should always do the right thing, even if it’s hard.”

“Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our fear and disconnection.”

“When we feel good about the choices we’re making and when we’re engaging with the world from a place of worthiness rather than scarcity, we feel no need to judge and attack.”

“It’s about becoming what I want to become. Not what some surgical committee thinks I should.”

″‘Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!‘”

“True terror isn’t being scared; it’s not having a choice on the matter.”

“Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.”

“We always have choices, Tally. You’ve made yours.”

“We don’t have to look like everyone else, Tally, and act like everyone else. We’ve got a choice. We can grow up any way we want.”

“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.”

“Jill, of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of ‘altruism’ is the worst. People do what they want to, every time.”

“Oh Father! Betsie! If I had known, would I have gone ahead? Could I have done the things I did?”

“But what kind of things one ought to choose instead of what, it is not easy to settle, for there are many differences in particular instances.”

“How should a Christian act when evil was in power?”

“Well, I won’t be lectured to by you about my everlasting duties to Nessie. I gave her my childhood. ... She’s made her life the way she wants it, and she still has choice and free will even now.”

“Salva made up his mind. He would walk south, to Kenya. He did not know what he would find once he got there, but it seemed to be his best choice.”

“Life was messy. Always had been and always would be and that was just the way it was, so why bother complaining? You either did something about it or you didn’t, and then you lived with the choice you made.”

“When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING.”

“And Clarissa had cared for him more than she had ever cared for Richard. Sally was positive of that. ‘No, no, no!’ said Peter (Sally should not have said that—she went too far).”

“Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.”

“You have to churn somewhat when the roof covering your head is at stake, since to sell is to walk away from a cluster of memories and to buy is to choose where the future will take place.”

“And, I think, for those of us who came of age with the women’s movement, there’s always the fear that it’s not real, you’re not really allowed to determine your own life. It may be pulled back at any moment.”

″‘I don’t see what’s so triflic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.‘”

“But now, as an examining magistrate, Ivan Ilych felt that everyone without exception, even the most important and self-satisfied, was in his power, and that he need only write a few words on a sheet of paper with a certain heading, and this or that important, self- satisfied person would be brought before him in the role of an accused person or a witness, and if he did not choose to allow him to sit down, would have to stand before him and answer his questions.”

“Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an absent one? O, Izz, don’t spoil it by regret!”

“You are not your history or your past. You are however, what you choose to do with your present and future. The biggest breakthrough of your life will be when you realize that life truly happens from you and not to you.”

“We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself.”

“It’s funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when the moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.”

“I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. ... A woman’s strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role.”

“Life is just a series of dumb decisions and indecisions and coincidences that we ascribe meaning to.”

“We have no control over the reality that in this world we will have trouble, but we have control over whether we decide to allow our hearts to be troubled.”

“The warrior knows that peace does not come from control but from relinquishing control. Everything in life that you try to control that is outside your control will steal from you your peace. You must choose to take hold of what you can control and let go of what you cannot. You cannot control your circumstances, but you can control your character. You cannot control the actions of others, but you can control the choices you make. You cannot control the outcome, but you can control the process.”

“There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two do not line up, you make a choice.”

“What you see reflects your thinking, and your thinking but reflects the choice of what you want to see.”

″... since there was no indication whatever to guide our choice, we were obliged to trust to chance.”

″‘The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.‘”

“When pressed with the choice between life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim.”

“ ‘A man is worked upon by what he works on,’ Frederick Douglass once said. He would know. He’d been a slave, and he saw what it did to everyone involved, including the slaveholders themselves. Once a free man, he saw that the choices people made, about their careers and their lives, had the same effect. What you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you. The egocentric path requires, as Boyd knew, many compromises.”

“We were standing at the intersection of two roads, both dark and narrow. Which were we to take? This was a difficulty. Still my uncle refused to admit an appearance of hesitation, either before me or the guide...”

“Good is the enemy of great. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”

“So this is a pageant. A violent one, meant to showcase a girl’s beauty, splendor—and strength. The most talented daughter. This is a display of power, to pair the prince with the most powerful girl, so that their children might be the strongest of all. And this has been going on for hundreds of years. I shudder to think of the strength in Cal’s pinkie finger.”

“I didn’t fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we’d choose anyway. And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.”

“I know that I have a choice, and I choose to change no matter what the cost.”

“Small, Smart Choices + Consistency + Time = RADICAL DIFFERENCE.”

“Choose to be kind over being right and you’ll be right every time.”

“Indeed, the important question in terms of becoming more peaceful isn’t whether or not you’re going to have negative thoughts – you are – it’s what you choose to do with the ones that you have.”

″‘Come,’ I said, with decision, ‘we will go back; your health is precious.‘”

″ When you make the choice to come to America, you become black. ”

“Dream big, they say. Shoot for the stars. Then they lock us away for 12 years and tell us where to sit, when to pee, and what to think. […] Then we turn 18 and even though we’ve never had an original thought, we have to make the most important decision of our lives. […] And if you don’t have the money and don’t really have the grades, a lot of the decision gets made for you.”

“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”

“And the worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing.”

“While I agree that I’ve never seen a kiwi bird fly, I disagree with the statement that they can’t fly. How do we know? Couldn’t it just be that they choose not to? You’ll never see me running, but there’s a good chance I could.”

″You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything...affects everything.”

“A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.”

“Choice,” rumbled a rich deep goloss. I viddied it belonged to the prison charlie. “He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, fear of physical pain, drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.”

“When something happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or get better.”

“To be courageous, these stories make clear, requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all.”

“The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life.”

“I don’t remember much about him, but I do remember he always wanted to be a grown-up. ‘I don’t have time for games,’ he would tell me. ‘I’m a man now.’ And when those soldiers said one of us could go free and the other would be taken to a concentration camp, Josef said, ‘Take me.’ My brother, just a boy, becoming a man at last.”

“Athletes and musicians may not enjoy practicing long hours, but they do so just the same; not out of duty, obligation, or any other form of self-manipulation, but because they are making secondary choices consistent with their primary choice to be able to perform music or excel at sports.”

“Some people choose ‘to go to college’ rather than choose ‘to be educated’, or choose ‘to eat health foods’ rather than choose ‘to be healthy.’ Because this kind of choice invests undue power in the process, the result is inextricably tied to the process, and the ways in which the desired result can come about are limited.”

“In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want.”

“If you limit your choice only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise.”

“In the orientation of the creative, once you have consciously made the choice to be healthy and you are attracted to eating certain foods and following certain forms of exercise, you are involved in an organic process.”

“Secondary choices are always subordinate to a primary choice. Often there is no reason to make such choices outside the context of the primary choice that calls for them.”

“I see it is there. I still fall in… it’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault… I get out immediately.”

“For sometimes a choice must be made—this is the definition of focus. Sacrifice is not a word: it is loss and achievement, and most of all it is caring about other more than self.”

“Bartleby: ‘I would not like it at all; though, as I said before, I am not particular.‘”

“We have a wider scope, greater variety of choice, and wider interests than an animal. But we, too, are confined to a relatively narrow compass which we cannot break out of.”

“In short, the truth of the matter was Nippers knew not what he wanted.”

″‘Why, how now? What next?’ exclaimed I, ‘do no more writing?’ ‘No more.’ ‘And what is the reason?’ ‘Do you not see the reason for yourself?’ he indifferently replied.”

“Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.”

“Pain is certain, suffering is optional.”

“You’ll just have to endure some things and give up other...everything must be paid for.”

“Don’t expect me to give up everything.”

“When I found the train was not going in the direction I wanted, I jumped off.”

“The interior drama, therefore, is always the important one. The “story of your life” is written by you, by each reader of this book. You are the author. There is no reason, therefore, for you to view the drama and feel trapped by it. The power to change your own condition is your own. You have only to exercise it.”

“Something like that happened to me, you know. I ... I’m not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another ... If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”

“Wishing that a risk wasn’t yours to take won’t make it any easier. In fact, it might make it harder. Your attitude about it is your choice.”

“It is always my choice.”

“It is never wise to purposefully do without the benefits of having a mentor in your life. You will waste valuable time in finding and shaping what you need to know. But sometimes you have no choice.”

“They had been brought up to think that the domestic virtues were self-evident and universal; they had been starved of the knowledge that most attracts the young mind: that the crown of life is the exercise of choice”

“Much of what we call our ‘personalities’ is actually the mosaic of our choices for self-protection plus our plan to get something out of the love we were created for.”

“They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”

‘Well she had no choice...Trixie bawled. She went boneless. She did everything she could to show how unhappy she was”.

“I have not really enjoyed my religions experiments very much and I don’t think I’ll make up my mind one way or the other for a long time. I don’t think a person can decide to be a certain religion just like that. It’s like having to choose your own name. You think about it a long time and then you keep changing your mind. If I should ever have children I will tell them what religion they are so they can start learning about it at a young age.”

“Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better.”

“He knew that finally, truly, at long last, someone was calling him home.”

“Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?”

“The straight path must sometimes be crooked.”

“It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn’t believe it, and I still don’t. I was, and still am, on the side of books you love.”

“Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It’s pain, It’s pleasure, Leave no path untaken.”

“Scrambled eggs always taste always the same. And that’s because ever since goodness knows when, they’ve always been made from the eggs of a hen. Just a plain common hen! What a dumb thing to use with all the other fine eggs you could choose!

“I see the Master as a man having terrible choices to make; whatever he chooses will do harm, but maybe if he does the right thing, a little less harm will come about than if he chooses wrong. God preserve me from having to make that sort of choice.”

“We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

“We can’t change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

“But if, once we return to the real world of human choice, we choose to be kind and generous, that is real love.”

“Most of us have more potential than we will ever develop. What holds us back is often a lack of courage.”

“Blue said we have to choose who we want to be, not let the situation choose us.”

“Sooner or later, you have to accept that you’re not responsible for other people’s choices. Worse, sometimes you can’t fix what’s wrong with them.”

“You get to decide how you show up in this world. No one else gets to dictate to you who you are,”

“This day was stressful and not fun, and if given the choice, I would choose to never do anything like it again. On the other hand, I do want what Mom wants, so she’s kind of right.”