"It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities."
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
— Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar)

"Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room."
— Bill Gates

"We are our choices."
— Jean-Paul Sartre

"'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo.
'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'"
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"Everything has a price."
— Anne Bishop

"If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed."
— Patrick H.T. Doyle

"It is our choices ... that show who we really are, far more than our abilities."
— J. K. Rowling

""When you see a fork in the road..........take it!"

Yogi Beara "
— Yogi Beara

"Not even I can see all ends, but I have been in this world long enough to know that a choice is not choice and breeds slow ills, even were it done for the highest reasons."
— Alison Croggon (The Riddle: The Second Book of Pellinor)

"Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him. And then choose that way with all his strength."
— Hasidic saying

"I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!"
— Oscar Wilde

"The choice of life is not between fame and fortune, nor wealth and poverty, but between good and evil."
— Boyd K. Packer

"'When someone has been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?' 'You wouldn't want to. That's what makes it hard. You do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.' --People of sparks--"
— Jeanne DuPrau

"At the end of the day, the questions we ask of ourselves determine the type of people that we will become."
— Leo Babauta

"The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, 'I've got
responsibilities.'"
— Richard Bach (Illusions)

"Whatever comes our way, whatever battle we have raging inside us, we always have a choice...It's the choices that make us who we are, and we can always choose to do what's right.
"
— Peter Parker

"If society wants us teenagers to make good choices, then they must present us good options."
— Alyssa Eddy

"The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to."
— Walker Percy (Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)

"If you choose to not deal with an issue,
then you give up your right of control over the issue
and it will select the path of least resistance.
"
— Susan Del Gatto

"'Have you ever been going somewhere with a crowd and you're certain it's the wrong road and you tell them, but they won't listen, so you just have to plod along in what you know is the wrong direction till somebody more important gets the same idea?'"
— James Hilton (Random Harvest)

""It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.""
— Roy Disney

"...but with the hours I sometimes kept at the coffeehouse I had to have learned to take naps during the day or die, and I had learned to take naps. Up until five months ago "something or other or die" had always seemed like a plain choice in favor of the something or other."
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them"
— Denis Waitley

"Im still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not."
— Haruki Murakami

"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)

""Action expresses priorities.""
— Mahatma Gandhi

"If I do not know the will of my Father, and what He requires of me in a certain transaction, if I ask Him to give me wisdom concerning any requirement in my life, or in regard to my own course, or that of my friends, my family, my children, or those that I preside over, and get no answer from Him, and then do the very best that my judgement will teach me, He is bound to own and honor that transaction, and He will do so to all intents and purposes."
— Brigham Young (Journal of Discourses: Volume 3)

"Each day is full of choices. It's full of decisions and actions, complications and simplicities. It is our fault if we make a bad choice, a bad decision, a bad action, revel in a complication, take for granted all the simplicities.
Someday we will understand why. But, for now, we must simply live, and pray that it all works out for us."
— Alysha Speer

"Resentment is often a woman's inner signal that she has been ignoring an important God-given responsibility - that of making choices."
— Brenda Waggoner

"These choices we make, they seem so small-- they're made in a split second and yet they can have a ripple effect for years."
— Heather McElhatton (Jennifer Johnson is Sick of Being Single)

"We have to choose between what is right, and what is easy."
— Albus Dumbledore

"We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Yes no yes no yes no?
Red blue?
Yes red, no blue?
No red, yes no?
In out, up down?
Do don't, can can't?
Choices sit on the shelf life
New shoes in a shoe shop.
If the in crowd are squeezing into a must-have shoe
And the one pair left are too tiny for you
Don't feel compelled into choosing them
If you're really a size 9, buy that size.
While everyone else
Hobbles round with sore feet
Your choices should feel comfortable
Or they aren't your choices at all.
Why limp when you can sprint?"
— David Baird (Fiesta of Happiness: Be True to Yourself)

"In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all."
— Herbert Edward Read

"What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins, where he comes from? I don’t think so. It’s his choices. Not how he starts things, but how he chooses to end them."
— Hellboy character