Quotes on Choices

...you will have a choice: to adjust how you live daily or to stay the same.

We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.

Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death.

In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the single most vivid representation of your own personality. Your spouse becomes the most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are.

most of my wandering in the desert i've done alone. not so much from choice as from necessity - i generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. i find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.

There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.

Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.

My behavior is a product of my own conscious choices based on principles, rather than a product of my conditions, based on feelings.

Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.” “Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.

If you want to make good use of your time, you've got to know what's most important and then give it all you've got.

Anyone who thinks that the vice-president can take a position independent of the president of his administration simply has no knowledge of politics or government. You are his choice in a political marriage, and he expects your absolute loyalty.

People in general would rather die than forgive. It's THAT hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

you can do anything you set your mind to

They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.

But 'Thou mayest!'! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.