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“Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There's no rule book that says how to do this." She laughed, bitterly. "Wouldn't that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there's no such thing. You want facts, don't you? Rules. Proof. You're like your father that way. Just because a thing can't be logged, charted, and summarized doesn't mean it isn't real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don't turn out that way. You have to pay attentin to what's real, what's in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it's a choice we could make.”
― David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

“With or without God, good decisions can be made; But only with God will great decisions be made.”
― Damon Thueson

“Just once I want it to be easy and neat. But no, there is never a good decision. I pick what I can live with.”
― Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns

“Nature consists of facts and of regularities, and is in itself neither moral nor immoral. It is we who impose our standards upon nature, and who in this way introduce morals into the natural world, in spite the fact that we are part of this world. We are products of nature, but nature has made us together with our power of altering the world, of foreseeing and of planning for the future, and of making far-reaching decisions for which we are morally responsible. Yet, responsibility, decisions, enter the world of nature only with us”
― Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato

“Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen.”
― Deanna Raybourn, Silent in the Sanctuary

“In life, you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed in another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?
”
― John Boyd

“Jung has said that to be in a situation where there is no way out, or to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless conflict in order to put ego-consciousness up against the wall, so that the man has to realise that whatever he does is wrong, whichever way he decides will be wrong. This is meant to knock out the superiority of the ego, which always acts from the illusion that it has the responsibility of decision. Naturally, if a man says, "Oh well, then I shall just let everything go and make no decision, but just protract and wriggle out of [it]," the whole thing is equally wrong, for then naturally nothing happens. But if he is ethical enough to suffer to the core of his personality, then generally because of the insolubility of the conscious situation, the Self manifests. In religious language you could say that the situation without issue is meant to force the man to rely on an act of God. In psychological language the situation without issue, which the anima arranges with great skill in a man's life, is meant to drive him into a condition in which he is capable of experiencing the Self. When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we should not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales: Revised Edition

“True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.”
― M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

“You will make mistakes. You will make decisions, and sometimes you will regret those choices. Sometimes there won't be a right choice, just the best of several bad options. I don't need to tell you that you can do this-you know you can.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows

“To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, Flecks of Gold on a Path of Stone: Simple Truths for Life's Complex Journey

“The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we'll get.”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“The average man is both better informed and less corruptible in the decisions he makes as a consumer than as a voter at political elections.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis

“Fortifying the company involves incorporating risk management considerations into strategic planning and decision making processes.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance

“Abuse doesn’t come from people’s inability to resolve conflicts but from one person’s decision to claim a higher status than another. So while it is valuable, for example, to teach nonviolent conflict-resolution skills to elementary school students—a popular initiative nowadays—such efforts contribute little by themselves to ending abuse. Teaching equality, teaching a deep respect for all human beings — these are more complicated undertakings, but they are the ones that count.”
― Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

“We all have things we regret…decisions we make that we have to live with. You can’t dwell on them and beat yourself up for it. It doesn’t change anything.”
― Penelope Ward, Jake Undone

“But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right?”
― Cecelia Ahern, The Time of My Life

“A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Monarchies have some good features beyond their star qualities. They can reduce the size and parasitic nature of the management bureaucracy. They can make speedy decisions when necessary. They fit an ancient human demand for a parental (tribal/feudal) hierarchy where every person knows his place. It is valuable to know your place, even if that place is temporary. It is galling to be held in place against your will. This is why I teach about tyranny in the best possible way—by example.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune