Choices Made

Sunday, August 12, 2012 – Choices Made

A peacefulness follows any decision, even the wrong one. ~ Rita Mae Brown

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice. ~ William James

Consider what you think justice requires, and decide accordingly. But never give your reasons; for your judgment will probably be right, but your reasons will certainly be wrong. ~ Lord Mansfield

Some persons are very decisive when it comes to avoiding decisions. ~ Brendan Francis

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn. ~ David Russell

Although every man believes that his decisions and resolutions involve the most multifarious factors, in reality they are mere oscillation between flight and longing. ~ Herman Broch

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. ~ Oscar Wilde

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice. ~ Woody Allen

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. ~ Aldous Huxley

In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods. ~ Stephen Bayley

Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman’s truncheon over the anarchist’s bomb. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. ~ Franz Kafka

A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain. ~ William Faulkner

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. ~ William James

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man’s choice, and is highly prized. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin. ~ Gore Vidal

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from. ~ Peter Ustinov

We must believe in free will, we have no choice. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nothing that you do will ever feel good if you let people convince you that you have no choice. ~ Fiona Apple

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play. ~ Willie Nelson

A man is given the choice between loving women and understanding them. ~ Ninon de L’Enclos

We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Was there ever in anyone’s life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before? ~ Joan Didion

Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can’t even see straight. ~ Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a reality the stars are out of reach. ~ Isaac Asimov

At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one’s own generation. ~ John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last. ~ Marcel Proust

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do. ~ Lillian Hellman

Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward. ~ e. e. cummings

All my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it. ~ Harry S. Truman