805 Choice Quotes

Mine to the core of the heart, my beauty! Mine, all mine, and for love, not duty: Love given willingly, full and free, Love for love's sake - as mine to thee. Duty's a slave that keeps the keys, But Love, the master, goes in and out Of his goodly chambers with song and shout, Just as he please - just as he please.

His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.

Lest Arab governments be tempted out of sheer routine to rush into impulsive rejection, let me suggest that tragedy is not what men suffer but what they miss.

That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.

In my life, I don't need to have my face plastered everywhere. It's not really something I want.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

It may almost be a question whether such wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of thought and resolution.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

Fortunately in my work there's always a choice: I can choose to do it willingly or unwillingly.

It costs money to stay healthy, but it's even more expensive to get sick.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

I'll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They're too much fun.

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle it smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. but it has one defect: it needs a driver.

I've been here before and will come again, but I'm not going this trip through.

I'm probably one of the most dangerous men in the world if I want to be. But I never wanted to be anything but me.

A man is basically as faithful as his options.

You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips.

We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?

Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.

Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

Whether or not anyone could have done it is not what's important. What is important is whether or not anyone would have done it.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.

Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

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

Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors.

Procrastinate now, don't put it off.

To some, freedom means the opportunity to do what they want to do; to most it means not to do what they do not want to do. It is perhaps true that those who can grow will feel free under any condition.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it.

I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I Am.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go.

I don't pursue anything. The only thing I always answer is my own impulse.

'Badgers can be choosers.'

A narrow compass! and yet there Dwelt all that 's good, and all that 's fair; Give me but what this riband bound, Take all the rest the sun goes round.

Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest.

If ever I become entirely respectable I shall be quite sure that I have outlived myself.

The people can have anything they want. The trouble is, they do not want anything. At least they vote that way on election day.

All beginnings are unvoluntary.

Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.

I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.

There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.

Liberty is the possibility of isolation.

George died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe that if I don't want to.

Do what you want to do, And go where you're going to. Think for yourself 'Cause I won't be there with you.

I'll play what you want or I won't play at all.

Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.

We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

We do not choose our concerns.

Sooner or later...one has to take sides - if one is to remain human.

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance-so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States of America, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union, if I had to choose between life in North Korea and life in South Korea, I would certainly choose North Korea.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There's a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay just for leaving things as they are, a price for everything.

Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone.

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.

My choice is the old world - my choice, my need, my life.

If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

I don't really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it's always nice, I'll grant you, if he has one.

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air.

Bob Crosby: That's like keeping the smog and throwing away Los Angeles.

Jack Benny: Does it have to be both?

Rochester: That's for me. I can't stand the sight of blood.

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas .

One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.

Ainsi que la vertu, le crime a ses degres; Et jamais on n'a vu la timide innocence Passer subitement a l'extreme licence.

'I don't keer w'at you do wid me, Brer Fox,' sezee, 'so you don't fling me in dat brier-patch. Roas' me, Brer Fox' sezee, 'but don't fling me in dat brier-patch,' sezee.

You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.

How happy could I be with either, Were t'other dear charmer away!

I can never consent to being dictated to.

I don't want to make a career of taking my shirt off. I'd like to shave off all my hair, even my eyebrows, try it that way. (1988)

[About Tracey Jacobs, his agent]: Tracey's taken a lot of heat over the years. She has bosses and higher-ups, and every time I take on another strange project, they're going, Jesus Christ! When does he do a movie where he kisses the girl? When does he get to pull a gun out and shoot somebody? When does he get to be a fucking man for a change? When is he finally going to do a blockbuster? (2004)

More than anything, I love being with my family. I'm like a total homebody, just hanging out with my kids. (2004)

Lance Hallstrom (the director) and I have been examining many boys for the part of my younger brother, and it was Leonardo (Dicaprio) who was chosen. He's a good kid...

Mankind is composed of two sorts of men - those who love and create, and those who hate and destroy.

He who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.

'My freshman year I was goin through hell, a problem/Still I, built up the nerve to drop my ass up outta collllllll-ege/My teacher said I'se a loser, I told her why don't you kill me/I give a fuck if you fail me, I'm gonna folllllllllll-ow/My heart, and if you follow the charts, to the plaques or the stacks/You ain't gotta guess who's back'

'Told 'em I finished school, and I started my own business/They say, 'Oh you graduated?'/No, I decided I was finished/ Chasin' y'all dreams and what you've got planned/Now I spit it so hot you got tanned'

Being a housewife and a mother is the biggest job in the world, but if it doesn't interest you, don't do it - I would have made a terrible mother.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

'All the same,' said the Scarecrow, 'I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.' 'I shall take the heart,' returned the Tin Woodman; 'for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.'

The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything. 'You people with hearts,' he said, 'have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn't mind so much.'

Fantasies aren't reality, I know, I know, I know. Except when they are. Except when you make them into reality.

I have got him fast hung up, quoth Didius to himself, upon one of the two horns of my dilemma - let him get off as he can.