decisions Quotes

“What it said was something like this—at least this is the sense of it though the poetry, when you read it there, was better: Make your choice, adventurous Stranger; Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had. ‘No fear!’ said Polly. ‘We don’t want any danger.’ ‘Oh but don’t you see it’s no good!’ said Digory. ‘We can’t get out of it now. We shall always be wondering what else would have happened if we had struck the bell. I’m not going home to be driven mad by always thinking of that. No fear!‘”

“You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And you are the one who’ll decide where to go.”

“Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down.”

“[M]aking a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.”

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

No teacher, preacher, parent, friend or wise man can decide what’s right for you – just listen to The voice that speaks inside.

“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.”

“I won’t tell you what to believe, Eragon. It is far better to be taught to think critically and then be allowed to make your own decisions than to have someone else’s notions thrust upon you.”

“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.”

“I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.”

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision

“She was of the mind that people should make their own decisions about their own lives, if you can image such a preposterous thing.”

“So often, we pretend we’ve made a decision, when what we’ve really done is signed up to try until it gets too uncomfortable.”

“I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism.”

“What further inferences may we draw?” “Do none suggest themselves? You know my methods. Apply them!”

“I’m glad you made your own decision.”

“I do so hate to make up my mind about anything, whether it’s good or bad, up or down, in or out, rain or shine.”

“Whether or not you find your own way, you’re bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it’s quite rusty.”

“If you like her, if she makes you happy, and if you feel like you know her--then don’t let her go.”

“And suddenly she knew exactly why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It wasn’t that he was unusually attractive, or ambitious, or even charming. He was partly those things, but more important, he seemed to live life on his own terms.”

Different roads sometimes lead to the same castle.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

“This process in turn helps us identify our values and reduces doubt and confusion in making life decisions. If we can have confidence in our decisions and launch enthusiastically into action without any doubts holding us back, we will be able to achieve much more. In other words, the sooner we confront our possessions the better. If you are going to put your house in order, do it now.”

“Discarding hones one’s decision-making skills.”

“But how do you know when the tracing looks bad enough? Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver? ‘Judgment call.’ What a call to make. In my life, had I ever made a decision harder than choosing between a French dip and a Reuben? How could I ever learn to make, and live with, such judgment calls?”

“I’m much better at interpreting books and stories than I am at understanding the decisions made by living, breathing people.”

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”

“If you decide to just go with the flow, you’ll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You’ll end up doing what everyone else is doing.”

“JUROR #11: If you want to vote not guilty, do it because you are convinced he is not guilty, not because you’ve had enough.”

“JUROR #8: This is somebody’s life. We can’t decide in five minutes.”

“JUROR #11: You have sat here and voted guilty with everyone else because there are some baseball tickets burning a hole in your pocket.”

“JUROR #7: I honestly think the guy is guilty. Couldn’t change my mind if you talked for 100 years.”

“JUDGE: It’s now your duty to sit down and try and separate the facts from the fancy.”

“For instance, a strange reflection suddenly occurred to me, that if I had lived before on the moon or on Mars and there had committed the most disgraceful and dishonourable action and had there been put to such shame and ignominy as one can only conceive and realise in dreams, in nightmares, and if, finding myself afterwards on earth, I were able to retain the memory of what I had done on the other planet and at the same time knew that I should never, under any circumstances, return there, then looking from the earth to the moon-should I care or not?”

“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

“In my mind, it was the first time that God had ever spoken directly to me, and I knew with certainty that I wasn’t going to disobey.”

“And if we answer the call to discipleship, where will it lead us? What decisions and partings will it demand? To answer this question we shall have to go to him, for only he knows the answer. Only Jesus Christ, who bids us follow him, knows the journey’s end. But we do know that it will be a road of boundless mercy. Discipleship means joy.”

“What would you like to have happen in your life this year? What would you like to do, to accomplish? What good would you like to attract into your life? What particular areas of growth would you like to have happen to you? What blocks, or character defects, would you like to have removed? What would you like to attain? Little things and big things? Where would you like to go? What would you like to have happen in friendship and love? What would you like to have happen in your family life? What problems would you like to see solved? What decisions would you like to make? What would you like to happen in your career? Write it down. Take a piece of paper, a few hours of your time, and write it all down - as an affirmation of you, your life, and your ability to choose. Then let it go.”

“And who decided which people wore striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?”

“We don’t have the luxury of thinking ... Some people make all the decisions for us.”

“Bruno was sure that he had never seen a skinnier or sadder boy in his life but decided that he had better talk to him.”

“How am I supposed to decide this? How can I possibly stay without Mom and Dad? How can I leave without Teddy? Or Adam?”

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

“‘Life might take you down different roads. But each of you gets to decide which one to take.’”

“I’m going. (He does not move).”

“I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.”

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

“It is not the brightest who succeed. ... Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those that have been given an opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

″ A competent general always draws up his battle plan before engaging the enemy; he doesn’t postpone basic decisions until the firing starts. But he is also prepared to change his plans if necessary to cope with an unexpected turn of events. So be ready to implement your plans as the day’s battle against the clock begins.”

“Making a change in your life is as easy as making a decision and acting on it. That’s it.”

“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.

“He makes these decisions with courage, detachment, and - sometimes - with just a touch of madness.”

″‘(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.‘”

“I looked over at Lucy. At least in my case, one of us got to make the decision. She had no choice when it came to losing the man she loved.”

“An open oven bakes no bread.”

“If it meant that I’d finally be able to put my grandfather’s mystery to rest and get on with my unextraordinary life, anything I had to endure would be worth it.”

“In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.”

“From the moment we are born, people tell us that the world is like this and like that, this way, that way. It is natural that – for a certain period of time – we end up believing what we are told. But we must soon push these ideas aside and discover our own way of living reality.”

“Our wise acts accompany us through life to please us and to help us. Just as surely, our unwise acts follow us to plague and torment us. Alas, they cannot be forgotten. In the front rank of the torments that do follow us are the memories of the things we should have done, of the opportunities which came to us and we took not.”

“I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. For starters, I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”

“I found the road to wealth when I decided that a part of all I earned was mine to keep.”

“Most people think small because they are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning.”

“One of the most important types of decision making is deciding what you are not going to do, what you need to eliminate in order to make room for strategic investments.”

“Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. [...] It is leadership. The word ‘judicious’ means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision making.”

“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.”

“We didn’t join the Corps ‘cause we felt like it, we joined ‘cause it was a life decision. We wanted to live by a code, sir. And we found it in the Corps. And now you’re asking me to sign a piece of paper that says we have no honor. We have no Code. You’re asking us to say we’re not Marines.”

“To alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

“The forces that moved our forebears to their great decision—the decision to leave their homes and begin an adventure filled with incalculable uncertainly, risk and hardship—must have been of overpowering proportions.”

“Sooner or later, we are bound to discover some things about ourselves that we don’t like. But once we see they’re there, we can decide what we want to do with them.”

“The forces that moved our forebears to their great decision—the decision to leave their homes and begin an adventure filled with incalculable uncertainly, risk and hardship—must have been of overpowering proportions.”

“He ought to tell Crowley. No, he didn’t. He wanted to tell Crowley. He ought to tell Heaven.”

“Men who succeed reach decisions promptly, and change them, if at all, very slowly. Men who fail, reach decisions, if at all, very slowly, and change them frequently, and quickly.”

“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.”

“What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead?”

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

“But even the worst decisions we make don’t necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity.”

“I planned to waste away and die, but there is a spirit of life, even in one such as myself, that stands in the way of such decisions. ”

“No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.”

“Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide.”

“The simple fact of the matter was that this man would probably have had no idea of the impact of his words. I surely was just someone who wanted to make a decision, who deep down wanted to make a change.”

“The only time you have no opportunities is when you decide to stop taking them.”

“I think we are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.”

“All that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon.”

“Two important lessons here. This first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking...The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters.”

“We like market research because it provides certainty - a score, a prediction; if someone asks us why we made the decision we did, we can point to a number. But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty.”

“After a few moments, Mama raised her head. “One of the things you will someday learn, daughters,” she said to me, “is that parents are never sure if certain decisions we make concerning our children are right.”

“I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

“Decide. Commit. Act. Succeed. Repeat.”

“On the third of June, at a minute past two, where once was a person, a flower now grew... The world was much crueler an hour ago. I’m glad someone decided to give flowers a go.”

“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.”

“Crying, semi-hysterically, Mom made a number of points: •Your friend is dying •It’s just so hard to watch a child die •And it’s much harder to watch a friend’s daughter die •But the hardest is watching your son watching his friend die •You have to make your own decisions now •It’s so hard for me to let you make your own decisions •But I have to let you make your own decisions •I am so proud of you •Your friend is dying, and you have been so strong.”

“You’ve been doing something all along. All this time, and now you are at an important place in this story.”

“Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.”

“Let her in or let her go. Neither.”

“Handing my heart over to Luke was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”

“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.”

″ In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience- the loss of friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men- each man must decide for himself the course he will follow.”

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

″‘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.”

“We all have an obligation to be happy.”

″‘Ain’t no one gonna tell you what’s in your heart,’ he tells Lev. ‘You gotta find that out for yourself.‘”

“Then, feeling the coldness of the steel against his fingertips, he pulls the fire alarm.”

“It is my pleasure to introduce your new police commissioner. I do not envy her the next few years. The job has few rewards. The best you can hope for is that when you’re finished with it, things aren’t as lousy as they would’ve been without you. Ellen Yindel is eminently qualified for this job...She face a city of thieves and murderers and honest people too frightened to hope. She faces life-and-death decisions, every hour to come. Some will torture her. She will face a man who is the living spoirit of...something we need. She may be his enemy. She may learn from him.”

“It’s funny how after we decide we don’t like someone, we can find reasons to support our decision, and equally the other way around.”

“And that was when I realized that somewhere in the last twenty-four hours a decision had been made: This was a secret. A secret with a capital S. A secret that we, as a family, would attempt to keep out of circulation for as long as we could.”

“It is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend, that they always reason right about the means of promoting it.”

“My heart struggles to make peace between God’s ability to change hard things and His apparent decision not to change them for me.”

″ Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts.”

“They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity”

“Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. ”

“Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.”

“Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. ”

“So you finally decided I’m telling the truth about being the sheriff of Red Rock, huh?”

“Well, there’s a girl I used to know, and I wasn’t sure if I should find her and talk to her of if I should just forget about it.”

″‘It’s yours,’ said Father. ‘You could buy a sucking pig with it, if you want to. You could raise it, and it would raise a litter of pigs, worth four, five dollars apiece. Or you can trade that half-dollar for lemonade, and drink it up. You do as you want, it’s your money.‘”

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

“Then Leonardo made a very bid decision.”

“All answers lie beyond the gate of experience.”

“After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that’s how I live now.”

But when the confused and curious boy discovers that a mysterious virus is spreading through town, he decides to enter an otherworldly house to stop it.

One day Bridget comes home to discover some moose sitting outside her building, and she decides to try them out as brothers.

“Make your mind up! Get it done! Only you can make your mind up! You’re the one and only one!”

“I should flee, get away. They will turn on me next unless I go. But where to? What am I to do? Lose myself. Die in the forest. I look around. Eyes, hard with hatred, slide from mine. Mouths twitch between leering and sneering. I will not run away into the forest, because that is what they want me to do.”

“You’re the one who has to live your life. Don’t apologize to other people for the decisions you make for yourself.”

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

“That’s life. You’re always making decisions, taking paths that lead you away from the rest before you can see where they end. Maybe that’s why we as a species love stories so much. All those chances for do-overs, opportunities to live the lives we’ll never have.”

“This is important because our behavior is affected by our assumptions or our perceived truths. We make decisions based on what we think we know.”

“Power is the ability to get what you want. Power is the ability to be the one making the decisions.”

“The White Flowers operated on chaos, on constant movement. But the climb to power was one of choice, and those who remained low within the gang did so by their own desire.”

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”

“Eventually you will hit a crossroads and you will have four choices with no compass to guide you. This may be the biggest decision of your life. Please, whatever you do, do not turn around and walk back the way you came. You didn’t come this far only to give up when your path is no longer clear.”

“the degree of awareness represents the difference. Rational people can readily admit their own irrational tendencies and the need to be vigilant. On the other hand, irrational people become highly emotional when challenged about the emotional roots of their decisions. They are incapable of introspection and learning. Their mistakes”

The villagers of Eyam make the heartbreaking decision to voluntarily quarantine themselves inside the village limits until the plague has run its course.

“Life is better, more fulfilling, and more rewarding when you are where your feet are, and the good news is that it is up to you to decide and commit.”

“Did she ever regret her choices? Were her decisions more clear-cut than mine - or are there always shades of gray whe it comes to matters of the heart?”

“i wish i could freeze this moment, somehow delay my final decision, and just hang here in the balance between two places, two worlds, two loves.”

“I think of how life takes unexpected twists and turns, sometimes through sheer happenstance, sometimes through calculated decisions. In the end, it can all be called fate, but to me, it is more a matter of faith.”

“What’s that there? What’s what there? I want to know what this is keep your hair on mate: ‘Mind your Own Business.’ Right now, I’d like best of all not to be here. I’ve been thinking that for an hour now.”

“Then she went over to her own little corner of the garden for a ‘think’, for she still could not make up her mind which of all those nice things to do.”

“The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.”

“Relief and anguish pulse heavily in my blood. I’ve wanted to see him every day. But also, I never wanted to see him again.”

“Then they looked at their street with no children. Then they looked at Henry’s face.”

“I don’t want your permission for that—I shall marry him: and yet you have not told me whether I’m right.” “Perfectly right; if people be right to marry only for the present.”

And I have myself admitted candidly several times already that that psychology can be taken in two ways and that the second way is stronger and looks far more probable, and that apart from that I have as yet nothing against you.