Quotes about Decisions

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Eleanor Roosevelt

A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
Tony Robbins

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
Theodore Roosevelt

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Plato

Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant.
Tony Robbins

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.
Joel Osteen

“The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.”
Flora Whittemore quotes

“Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.”
Tom Robbins

“Sometimes it’s the smallest decisions that can change your life forever.”
Keri Russell

“A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion”
Chinese Proverb

“Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work.” H. L. Hunt.

“Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.”
Sophocles

“Some choices we live not only once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives.”
Richard Bach

“Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality in a good leader.”
General George S. Patton

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.”
Amelia Earhart

Men and women everywhere must exercise deliberate selection to live wisely.
– Robert Grant

Decision and determination are the engineer and fireman of our train to opportunity and success.
– Burt Lawlor

The last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
– Viktor Frankl

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.
– W. H. Auden

You are the one who must choose your place.
– James Lane Allen

Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
– Viktor Frankl

It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
Tony Robbins

Full maturity … is achieved by realizing that you have choices to make.
– Angela Barron McBride
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Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
– Peter Drucker

Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind.
– Timothy Fuller

Life is just an endless chain of judgements. . . . The more imperfect our judgement, the less perfect our success.
– B. C. Forbes

To know just what has do be done, then to do it, comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
– Sir William Osier

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
– Jawaharlal Nehru

Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.
– Jose Ortega

Life is the sum of all your choices.
– Albert Camus

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
– Samuel Butler

The difficulty of life is in the choice.
– George Moore

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
– George Eliot

As a man thinketh, so is he, and as a man chooseth, so is he.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Decisions determine destiny.
– Frederick Speakman

Choices are the hinges of destiny.
– Edwin Markham

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.
– Charles Millhuff

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.
– Joan Baez

Look for your choices, pick the best one, then go with it.
– Pat Riley

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.
– Niccolo Machiavelli

A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.
– Dorothea Brande

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
– Thomas Merton

Choose always the way that seems the best, however rough it may be; custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.
– Pythagoras

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.
– General George S. Patton

Once the “what” is decided, the “how” always follows. We must not make the “how” an excuse for not facing and accepting the “what.”
– Pearl S. Buck

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.
– H. W. Andrews

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.
– George Eliot

Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish among dangers and make a choice of the least harmful.
– Niccolo Machiavelli

I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.
– Dr. Joyce Brothers

When one bases his life on principle, 99 percent of his decisions are already made.
– Anonymous

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.
– Henry Ford

In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.
– Karl Kraus

What I emphasize is for people to make choices based not on fear, but on what really gives them a sense of fulfillment.
– Pauline Rose Chance

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.
– Svetlana Alliluyeva

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge…
– Anne Bradstreet

One faces the future with one’s past.
– Pearl S. Buck

Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.
Tony Robbins

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
– George Eliot

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
– Ursula K. LeGuin

The Pilgrims didn’t have any experience when they landed here…if experience was that important, we’d never have anybody walking on the moon.
– Doug Rader

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.
– Anna Deavere Smith

The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction book didn’t come with it.
– R. Buckminster Fuller

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.
– Lewis Mumford

I learn by going where I have to go.
– Theodore Roethke

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
– Samuel Butler

Faith … acts promptly and boldly on the occasion, on slender evidence.
– John Henry Cardinal Newman

A decision is an action you must take when you have information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.
– Arthur Radford

When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.
– Edith Hamilton

How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?
– Harry S. Truman

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.
– Roger M. Blough

Statistics are no substitute for judgement.
– Henry Clay

It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
– Thomas Carlyle

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.
– Peter Cooper

He who reflects too much will achieve little.
– J. C. F. von Schiller

The opportunity is often lost by deliberating.
– Publilius Syrus

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.
– Latin proverb

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.
– William B. Given

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.
– Bobby Murcer

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.
– H. Van Anderson

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.
– Lee Iacocca

Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.
– Harry A. Hopf

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

Do not wait for ideal circumstances, nor the best opportunities; they will never come.
– Janet Erskine Stuart

Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable to do nothing.
– William Feather

Nothing at all will be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
– Samuel Johnson

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

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

It is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.
– Anne Bronte

A door must either be shut or open.
– Anonymous

Here’s a rule I recommend. Never practice two vices at once.
– Tallulah Bankhead

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

Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice.
– Vauvenargues

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

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.
– John Foster

Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.
– Bertrand Russell

Not to decide is to decide.
– Harvey Cox

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

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

In not making the decision, you’ve made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.
– Ivan Bloch

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.
– Eugene 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

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

A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.
– Henri Frederic Amiel

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

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 Hammarskjold

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.
– Napoleon Bonaparte

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.
– William Jennings Bryan

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

Once a decision was made, I did not worry about it afterward.
– Harry S. Truman

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