quotations about choice
It's hard to make a choice between two blind dogs.
IRISH PROVERB
The measure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he has chosen.
CHARLES LAMB
Essays of Elia
Between two stools one sits on the ground.
FRANCOIS RABELAIS
Gargantua
To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.
PATRICK NESS
Monsters of Men
The difficulty in life is the choice.
GEORGE MOORE
Bending of the Bough
Choice there is not, unless the thing which we take to be so is in our power, that we might have refused it. If the fire consume the stable, it choseth not so to do, because the nature thereof is such that it can do no other.
RICHARD HOOKER
Ecclesiastical Polity
For our choices take our dimensions in two ways: First, by the kind of them. We may select paltry and showy things, ease, pleasures which have no mind in them, cheap influence with our fellows. Whether there be baseness in this, or whether, as the Stoics would have it, it be only such a savage ignorance as would choose a glass bead before a book, the reckoning is the same as to coarse grain in character; and they who publish this measure of themselves do, indeed, like heavy-bearded cowards, assume but "nature's excrement" to make themselves respected. If we set our choice so high that perforce the low must be left, so high as beauty, generosity, strength of mind, stores of knowledge, memories of the hungry fed, the forsaken cheered, the fallen lifted, humane works watched and reenforced--it is no more than to elect the things which mark us as men.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
Essays
There are moments in our lives when we find ourselves at a crossroads. Afraid. Confused. Without a roadmap. The choices we make in those moments can define the rest of our days.
LUCAS SCOTT
"Things I Forgot at Birth", One Tree Hill
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Sexing the Cherry
You have a choice. Live or die.
Every breath is a choice.
Every minute is a choice.
Every time you don't throw yourself down the stairs, that's a choice. Every time you don't crash your car, you re-enlist.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Survivor
The difficulty in life is the choice.
GEORGE MOORE
The Bending of the Bough
A victim of collision on the open sea
Nobody ever said that life was free
Sank, swam, go down with the ship
But use your freedom of choice
DEVO
"Freedom of Choice"
We make our decisions, and then our decisions turn around and make us.
F. W. BOREHAM
attributed, The Westminster Collection of Christian Quotations
What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?
JIM BUTCHER
White Night
The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Committed
The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
FLORA WHITTEMORE
attributed, Quote Unquote
He that will not when he may,
When he will he shall have nay.
ROBERT BURTON
Anatomy of a Melancholy
It is only the superior man who can make a right choice.
CONFUCIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
To choose, is to will one thing before another; and to will, is to bend our souls to the having or doing of that which they see to be good.
RICHARD HOOKER
Ecclesiastical Polity
Imagine a captain of a ship the moment a shift of direction must be made; then he may be able to say: I can do either this or that. But if he is not a mediocre captain he will also be aware that during all this the ship is ploughing ahead with its ordinary velocity, and thus there is but a single moment when it is inconsequential whether he does this or does that. So also with a person--if he forgets to take into account the velocity--there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him-or because he has lost himself.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Either/Or