Quotes about choices

Choice... He has no real choice, has he? Self-interest, the 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 a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man."

"Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

The people. They know how to know, but not how to choose.

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

[The Hebrew] word timshel — Thou mayest — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if Thou mayest — it is also true that Thou mayest not... [Thou mayest] makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth ... he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.

If two generous paths branch from the highroad of life and only one can be followed, who is to judge which is best?

Stripped to its essentials, every decision in life amounts to choosing which lottery ticket to buy. . . . Most organisms don't buy lottery tickets, but they all choose between gambles every time their bodies can move in more than one way. They should be willing to 'pay' for information---in tissue, energy, and time---if the cost is lower than the expected payoff in food, safety, mating opportunities, and other resources, all ultimately valuated in the expected number of surviving offspring. In multicellular animals the information is gathered and translated into profitable decisions by the nervous system.

So what was I to do? To go backward was base: to go forward an adventure into splendour and terror. But it was forward I must go.

If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get.

One rule observed in their council is, never to debate a thing on the same day in which it is first proposed; for that is always referred to the next meeting, that so men may not rashly and in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed; and therefore, to prevent this, they take care that they may rather be deliberate than sudden in their motions.