Choice Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity.

Stephen A. Diamond

Love is a thousand things, but at the center is a choice. It is a choice to love people. Left to myself, i get quiet and bitter and critical. i get angry. i feel sorry for myself. It is a choice to love people. It is a choice to be kind. It is a choice to be patient, to be honest, to live with grace. i would like to start making better choices.

Jamie Tworkowski

Sixty percent of the newspaper space may be filled with advertising, but that advertising does not command sixty percent of the average reader's attention. We are inured to most of these advertisements and commercials; they wash over us without even dampening the skin. We often do not stop to even read or watch the ads at all, and when we do, they rarely penetrate or connect with our consciousness, let alone transform our identity. True, we are all persuaded and seduced from time to time by these ads, encouraged to make irrational impulsive consumer choices. But that kind of persuasion and seduction is endemic to social life; we run across it constantly and develop mechanisms to filter it out and fend it off.

Rodney A. Smolla

From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.

Robert Aris Willmott

Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope. There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome.

You tell your Governor, your attorney general and all the bigoted pigs outside that if one person on Rancho Rajneesh is harmed I will have 15 of their heads, and I mean it. You have given me no choice. Even though I am a nonviolent person I will do that.

Ma Anand Sheela

I enjoy collecting quotations. When I find a choice one I pounce on it like a lepidopterist. My day is made. When I lose one because I did not copy it out at once I feel bereft.

R. I. Fitzhenry

False hope can lead to intemperate choices and flawed decision making. True hope takes into account the real threats that exist and seeks to navigate the best path around them.

Jerome Groopman

Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude. Ours is a nonviolent movement that depends on faith in the human predilection for fair play and compassion.
Some would insist that man is primarily an economic animal interested only in his material well-being. This is too narrow a view of a species which has produced numberless brave men and women who are prepared to undergo relentless persecution to uphold deeply held beliefs and principles. It is my pride and inspiration that such men and women exist in my country today.

Aung San Suu Kyi

When I came back from Munich, it was September, and I was Professor of Mathematics at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Later I learned that I had been the Department's third choice, after two numerical analysts had turned the invitation down; the decision to invite me had not been an easy one, on the one hand because I had not really studied mathematics, and on the other hand because of my sandals, my beard and my "arrogance" (whatever that may be).

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Whatever the apparent aim of the artist, he is called upon first to move the spectator, after having been himself struck by a design or color composition which may or may not have a relation to natural objects. His predilections, his preferences, crystallize afterwards in the choice of means to interpret those natural objects; these means are always, obligingly, of imaginary essence.

And now Marat
now I see where
this revolution is heading
To the withering of the individual man
and a slow merging into uniformity
to the death of choice
to self denial
to deadly weakness
in a state
which has no contract with individuals
but which is impregnable

And so really, you have given me no choice but to take you shopping by force. She sighed, then reached up, dropping her sunglasses down from their perch on her head to cover her eyes. Do you even realize how happy the average teenage girl would be in your shoes? I have a credit card. We're at the mall. I want to buy you things. It's like adolescent nirvana. - Cora

The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.

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.

Christopher Paolini

Just because you are lucky does not mean you make good choices.

Viggo Mortensen

I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.

Jonathan Tropper

Free will means that you have the choice to connect to spirit... or not.

Our lives are so full of activity and "chatter" it's difficult to find quiet time… Those are the moments that are the most creative for me. The location is less important than the choice to turn other things off. Because I find that the quietest times of my life speak the loudest.

Regina E. Dugan

Acceptance means focusing on the present while assessing the choices available to you in this moment. If there are many possibilities, make the choice that is likely to bring the most evolutionary results. If there is only one choice, take it. If there are no obvious choices, relax and accept the fact that for now, you cannot do anything.