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Decisions Quotes and Quotations
 Men and women everywhere must exercise deliberate selection to live wisely.  Decision and determination are the engineer and fireman of our train to opportunity and success. The last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. Choice of attention ... is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. You are the one who must choose your place. Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. Full maturity ... is achieved by realizing that you have choices to make. Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind. Life is just an endless chain of judgements. . . . The more imperfect our judgement, the less perfect our success. To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life. Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will. Somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision. Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do. Life is the sum of all your choices. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. The difficulty of life is in the choice. The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he. Decisions determine destiny. Choices are the hinges of destiny. Many of life's circumstances are created by three basic choices: the disciplines you choose to keep, the people you chose to be with, and the laws you choose to obey. You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now. Look for your choices, pick the best one, then go with it. Rules of society are nothing; one's conscience is the umpire. No matter how lovesick a woman is, she shouldn't take the first pill that comes along. Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies. One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion. Decide which is the line of conduct that presents the fewest drawbacks and then follow it out as being the best one, because one never finds anything perfectly pure and unmixed, or exempt from danger. A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved. We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. Choose always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be; custom will soon render it easy and agreeable. Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct. In forty hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur of the moment will have to make the most momentous decisions. But I believe that one's spirit enlarges with responsibility and that, with God's help, I shall make them, and make them right. Once the "what" is decided, the "how" always follows. We must not make the "how" an excuse for not facing and accepting the "what." In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relation of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious. One's mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision. Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it. Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution ... is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty. When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature. Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful. I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk. Human foresight often leaves its proudest possessor only a choice of evils. When one bases his life on principle, 99 percent of his decisions are already made. The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them, and then make our plans with confidence. In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct. Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. People "died" all the time. ... Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out ... you always knew when you made a decision against life. ... The door clicked and you were safe inside- safe and dead. What I emphasize is for people to make choices based not on fear, but on what really gives them a sense of fulfillment. We lose the fear of making decisions, great and small, as we realize that should our choice prove wrong we can, if we will, learn from the experience. - Bill W. History is a stern judge. I get a little angry about this highhanded scrapping of the look of things. What else have we to go by? How else can the average person form an opinion of a girl's sense of values or even of her chastity except by the looks of her conduct? You wouldn't want to be caught wearing cheap perfume, would you? Then why do you want to wear cheap perfume on your conduct? The difference between weakness and wickedness is much less than people suppose; and the consequences are nearly always the same. Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than to polish. One faces the future with one's past. Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are. You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life. The Pilgrims didn't have any experience when they landed here. Hell, if experience was that important, we'd never have anybody walking on the moon. Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives. There is no data on the future. The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction book didn't come with it. Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner. Time has told me less than I need to know. I learn by going where I have to go. Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. We don't have enough time to premeditate all our actions. Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. Faith ... acts promptly and boldly on the occasion, on slender evidence. A decision is an action you must take when you have information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself. She knew in her heart that to be without optimism, that core of reasonless hope in the spirit, rather than the brain, was a fatal flaw, the seed of death. When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith. How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? Better to be without logic than without feeling. The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel. In the three years I played ball, we won six, lost seventeen and tied two. Some statistician ... calculated that we won 75 percent of the games we didn't lose. Imagination took the reins, and Reason, slow-paced, though surefooted, was unequal to a race with so eccentric and flighty a companion. Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement. How dangerous can false reasoning prove! The tendency of modern science is to reduce proof to absurdity by continually reducing absurdity to proof. Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people, you would be perfectly comfortable. Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence. Reason, with most people, means their own opinions. Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic. Man is a reasoning, rather than a reasonable, animal. False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse. If you do everything you should do, and do not do anything you should not do, you will, according to the best available statistics, live exactly eighteen hours longer than you would otherwise. 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. Statistics are no substitute for judgement. It is the heart always that sees before the head can see. Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable. A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast. It is always thus, impaled by a state of mind which is destined not to last, that we make our irrevocable decisions. A power greater than any human being helped make this decision. He who reflects too much will achieve little. The opportunity is often lost by deliberating. 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. Deliberation often loses a good chance. The mania of thinking renders one unfit for every activity. When possible make the decisions now, even if action is in the future. A revised decision usually is better than one reached at the last moment. We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve. If you think too long, you think wrong. - Jim Kaat You decide you'll wait for your pitch. Then as the ball starts toward the plate, you think about your stance. And then you think about your swing. And then you realize that the ball that went past you for a strike was your pitch. The soul of dispatch is decision. The moment a question comes to your mind, see yourself mentally taking hold of it and disposing of it. In that moment... you learn to become the decider and not the vacillator. Thus you build character. So what do we do? Anything. Something. So long as we just don't sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late. Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision. Some persons are very decisive when it comes to avoiding decisions. Do not wait for ideal circumstances, nor the best opportunities; they will never come. There comes a time when you've got to say, "Let's get off our asses and go ..." I have always found that if I move with 75 percent or more of the facts I usually never regret it. It's the guys who wait to have everything perfect that drive you crazy. Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing. Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game. He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. - Horace If you wait for inspiration you'll be standing on the corner after the parade is a mile down the street. Nothing at all will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome. It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves. 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. The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. 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. 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. There is only one answer to destruc-tiveness and that is creativity. A door must either be shut or open. Here's a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once. 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. There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. You cannot have it both ways. 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. Of two evils, choose the less. Of two evils, choose the prettier. Where bad's the best, bad must be the choice. Both choices are painful, but only one is therapeutic. God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please-you can never have both. 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. 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. You can only predict things after they've happened. It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable, in retrospect. No one knows what he can to do until he tries. 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. 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. 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. No question is ever settled until it is settled right. 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. 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. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide ... And the choice goes by forever t'wixt that darkness and that light. Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation. We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. 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. Optimism is an intellectual choice. 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. Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide. 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. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. 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. 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. We have resolved to endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable. Once a decision was made, I did not worry about it afterward. No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time. The last, if not the greatest, of the human freedoms: to choose their own attitude in any given circumstance. He who has a choice has trouble. 
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