Quotes about Choice

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude  in  any given set of circumstances, to  choose one's own way.

Ultimately, man is not subject to the conditions that confront him; rather, these conditions are subject to his decision.

Freedom is part of the story and half of the truth. Being free is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is being responsible. Freedom may degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

It was Kierkegaard who told the wise parable that the door to happiness always opens 'outwards', which means it closes itself precisely against the person who tries to push the door to happiness 'inwards', so to speak.

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

Well, I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.

It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.

You touch some of the reasons for my going, not for my staying away.

Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never have had it?

To be the hero of my life or forever its victim.

How others treat me is their path; how I react is mine.

Life: A compromise between Fate and Freewill.