Quotes about choices

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them. Nothing is more paralyzing than the idea of limitless possibilities.

First things first. Get the facts, then decide what to do next. And hope that there is a next.

The problem with paranoia was that if you let it rule all your decisions, then you would miss some perfectly good opportunities.

I shoulda been making proper plans to go right then. But I wasn't. You ever seen a chased rabbit give in running? When he just pulls up and stands there? Like he's out of puff and out of ideas and can't put two moves together anymore? Well that was me. I shoulda been gone already. It was like I was paralysed.

Thing is, I'm not the surrendering type. Anyway I'm looking up and down that track. It was the highway or the wildywoods. That was the decision. Between something that's real and something you hope is real. I was banking everything on this call and maybe I wasn't fully right in the head by then but I went east. Roll the dice, that's me.

“You know how some people work at being stupid?” she asked. “If you give them a clear, common sense choice they give it a lot of thought and then choose stupid.”

Those forced to make impossible choices are rarely loved. If it’s approval and reputation you care about, then you have no place here.

You want to know if it was worth it. I can’t answer that, Isaac. We can know what was, but not what might have been.

She paused, then added, “Besides, you don’t really want to know what I think. You’ve already come to your own conclusion. You just want me to talk you out of it.”

I had forgotten how annoying Nidhi could be when she was right.

“I’ve made my choice, Sam,” she had written. “I had to choose between what I wanted and what I could get. There are times when the ideal is just too unattainable and when the second best becomes, in the long run, the best. Maybe this also has a universal application. I hope so.”

The clever part is that it changes the question from, Who should I believe? to, What should I do? After all, the physical world is unaffected by our beliefs. It reacts only to our actions.

Decision-making is the tortuous by-product of the Socratic method. Because at some point skepticism and questioning have to give way to personal judgment in the shape of a decision made. And that is the most daunting part of a forbidding process. As Socrates knew only too well, the more you question the more you realize that there are no concrete answers. Doubt reigns supreme, an inescapable truth he succinctly expressed when he said, “All I know is that I know nothing.”