Decisions Quotes

The last if not the greatest of the human freedoms: to choose their own attitude in any given circumstance.

Bruno Bettelheim

He who has a choice has trouble.

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return.

Dag Hammarskjöld

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.

Henry Kissinger

After a battle is over people talk a lot about how decisions were methodically reached but actually there's always a hell of a lot of groping around.

Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher

No question is ever settled until it is settled right.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

No man who has not sat in the assemblies of men can know the light odd and uncertain ways in which decisions are often arrived at.

Sir Arthur Helps

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.

A man must be able to cut a knot for everything cannot be untied.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide ... And the choice goes by forever t'wixt that darkness and that light.

James Russell Lowell

Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

Dag Hammarskjöld

Optimism is an intellectual choice.

Diana Schneider

The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one ... the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.

There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes but what our purposes are to be.

What must be shall be and that which is a necessity to him that struggles is little more than choice to him that is willing.

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

A wiser rule would be to make up your mind soberly what you want peace or war and then to get ready for what you want for what we prepare for is what we shall get.

William Graham Sumner

We have resolved to endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable.

Emperor Hirohito

Once a decision was made I did not worry about it afterward.

Harry S. Truman

You cannot have it both ways.

Anonymous

I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness. Other things being equal I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.

Katharine Butler Hathaway

Of two evils choose the less.

Anonymous

Of two evils choose the prettier.

Where bad's the best bad must be the choice.

Anonymous

Both choices are painful but only one is therapeutic.

Albert M. Wells

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please-you can never have both.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it that is in itself a choice.

A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself he is as a wave of the sea or a feather in the air which every breeze blows about.

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.

Bertrand Russell

Not to decide is to decide.

Decision is a sharp knife that cuts clean and straight indecision a dull one that hacks and tears and leaves ragged edges behind it.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

In not making the decision you've made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.

There is a time when we must firmly choose the course we will follow or the relentless drift of events will make the decision for us.

Herbert B. Prochnow

You can only predict things after they've happened.

Eugène Ionesco

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

Robert Louis Stevenson

No one knows what he can to do until he tries.

Publilius Syrus

Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.

Alternatives and particularly desirable alternatives grow only on imaginary trees.

The more one does and sees and feels the more one is able to do and the more genuine may be one's own appreciation of fundamental things like home and love and understanding companionship.

Our danger is not too few but too many options ... to be puzzled by innumerable alternatives.

Sir Richard Livingstone

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Henry Kissinger

I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.

If decisions were a choice between alternatives decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

You cannot have your cake and eat it.

Anonymous

It is better to arm and strengthen your hero than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.

You cannot sell the cow and sup the milk.

Anonymous

There is only one answer to destruc-tiveness and that is creativity.

Sylvia Ashton-Warner

A door must either be shut or open.

Anonymous

Here's a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once.

Tallulah Bankhead

You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Bible

Between two stools one sits on the ground.

When you cannot make up your mind between two evenly balanced courses of action choose the bolder.

When confronted with two courses of action I jot down on a piece of paper all the arguments in favor of each one then on the opposite side I write the arguments against each one. Then by weighing the arguments pro and con and cancelling them out one against the other I take the course indicated by what remains.

Benjamin Franklin

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

A power greater than any human being helped make this decision.

Herbert J. Steifel

He who reflects too much will achieve little.

J. C. F. von Schiller

The percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long-drawn-out vacillations and the effect of decisiveness itself "makes things go" and creates confidence.

Anne O'Hare McCormick

Deliberation often loses a good chance.

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