Decisions Quotes

“No single decision you ever made has led in a straight line to where you find yourself now. You peeked down some roads and took a few steps before turning back. You followed some roads that came to a dead end and others that got lost at too many intersections. Ultimately, all roads are connected to all other roads.”
― Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

“The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader

“I am sorry my decisions do not meet with your approval, but nevertheless, they are mine, and the consequences are also mine.”
― Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance

“Every game is winnable if you change your mind about what the prize should be and your perspective about the players at the table.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Don't decide yet," Hephaestus advised. "Wait until daybreak. Daybreak is a good time for decisions.”
― Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth

“Living a life somewhere else in your mind is nothing more than being a prisoner where you are.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.”
― David Brooks

“There is nothing in the world so difficult as that task of making up one's mind. Who is there that has not longed that the power and privilege of selection among alternatives should be taken away from him in some important crisis of his life, and that his conduct should be arranged for him, either this way or that, by some divine power if it were possible, - by some patriarchal power in the absence of divinity, - or by chance, even, if nothing better than chance could be found to do it? But no one dares to cast the die, and to go honestly by the hazard. There must be the actual necessity of obeying the die, before even the die can be of any use.”
― Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn

“Question."
"Yes," Candace asked expectantly, eyes fixed on the dark street ahead.
"Have you ever had to chose sides between a friend and a boyfriend?"
Candace nodded.
"Which side are you suppose to pick?"
"The right one."
"What if they're both right?"
"They're not."
"But they are," Melody insisted. "That's the problem."
"No." Candace slowly rolled past a police cruiser. "They both think they're right. But who do you think is right? Which side represents the thing you think is worth fighting for?"
Melody glanced out the window as though she was expecting the answer to be revealed on a neighbor's lawn. Every house except hers had the lights turned off. "I dunno."
"You do," Candace insisted. "You just don't have the courage to be honest with yourself. Because then you'd have to do the thing you don't want to do, and you hate doing anything that's hard. Which is why you gave up singing and why you have no life and why you've always been a -"
"Um okay! Can we get back to the part where you were sounding like Oprah?"
"I'm just saying, Melly, what would you do if you weren't afraid? That's your answer. That's your side." She turned into the circular driveway and put the SUV in PARK. "And if you don't choose it, you're lying to yourself and everyone around you." She opened the door and grabbed her purse. "Oprah out!"
The door slammed behind her.”
― Lisi Harrison, Monster High

“The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“You couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around.
This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.'
And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice.
Wish granted. Now what?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“People always say in the end you only regret the choices you didn't make but I really think you also regret the choices you were foolish enough to make.”
― Melizena

“…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. "

"What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?”
― Jesse Ball, The Curfew

“Success is not determined by the outcome. The outcome is the result of having already decided that you are successful to begin with.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence

“Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.”
― Percy Williams Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory

“Can't it be stopped?" said Lina. She shifted around under her blanket, trying to find a place to sit where rocks weren't digging into her.
Maybe it can be stopped at the beginning," Maddy said. "If someone sees what's happening and is brave enough to reverse the direction."
Reverse the direction?"
Yes, turn it around."
How would you do that?"
You'd do something good," said Maddy. "Or at least you'd keep yourself from doing something bad."
But how could you?" said Lina. "When people have been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?"
You wouldn't want to," said Maddy. "That's what makes it hard. you do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.”
― Jeanne DuPrau, The People of Sparks

“#Cats are marvelous creatures - they either adapt to circumstances, or decide to make circumstances adapt to them. Either way - they win.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.”
― Chris Wooding, Poison

“The worst decisions in life we make are always the one we make out of fear.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, Born of Betrayal

“Your most important “want” should be the one you can control!”
― Shannon L. Alder

“No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.”
― James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

“Every day you face two important decisions: what effect you want your speech and actions to have on the world around you, and what impressions and vibrations you want to be receptive to.”
― Kalashatra Govinda, A Handbook of Chakra Healing: Spiritual Practice for Health, Harmony, and Inner Peace

“People skills are useless with cats, because cats are immune to training, and do whatever they decide in any situation... And most importantly they aren’t human.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“She had come to the clinic because she didn't want to be a little girl anymore. But it wasn't having sex that made you a woman. It was having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children were told what to do. Adults made up their own minds, even when the options tore them apart.”
― Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light

“Those are Father's words, Inan. His decisions. Not yours. We are our own people. We make our own choices.”
― Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone

“Be aware that how you feel has a direct impact on your thinking process. When we set standards for ourselves they seem objective, but standards and goal-setting are totally subjective and personal." From The Biology of Success.”
― Robert Arnot

“Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.”
― James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

“Trust yourself and try not to get lured off course by conflicting opinions that don't seem to sit right with you.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice