Selected choice quotes

1. 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.

2. 'I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.'

3. I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

4. I consciously choose the dog's path through life. I shall be poor; I shall be a painter...

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

6. 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.

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

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

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

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. We must as second best, as people say, take the least of the evils.

14. What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

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

16. I too have known joy and sadness, and, on the whole, I prefer joy.

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

18. For me, it's always easy to choose between the Ultimate, the Infinite, and the Chocolate.

19. I am irrevocably committed to being permanently indecisive.

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

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

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

25. 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.

26. A man is basically as faithful as his options.

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

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

29. 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.

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

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

32. 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.

33. I would rather start a family than finish one.

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

35. 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.

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

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

38. Procrastinate now, don't put it off.

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. I hung up. It was a step in the right direction, but it didn't go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.

42. The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

43. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

44. Remember, Humphrey Bogart was not the first choice for Casablanca; Ronald Reagan was. So maybe if Ronnie had taken the part, Humprey Bogart could have been president. And maybe if you date this guy, you could be president too!

45. When I meet a man I ask myself, 'Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?'

46. Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.

47. A motion to adjourn is always in order.

48. It is better to copulate than never.

49. It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.

50. There is no such thing as 'social gambling.' Either you are there to cut the other bloke's heart out and eat it - or you're a sucker. If you don't like this choice - don't gamble.

51. White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life's business being just the terrible choice.

52. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

53. Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went - Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. But no, I was out for stars; I would not come in. I meant not even if asked; And I hadn't been.

54. Belief is not a voluntary thing. A man believes or disbelieves in spite of himself. They tell us that to believe is the safe way; but I say, the safe way is to be honest.

55. I want no heaven for which I must give my reason; no happiness in exchange for my liberty, and no immortality that demands the surrender of my individuality.

56. To me, the most obscene word in the language is celibacy.

57. To me, the tenderest word in our language, the most pathetic fact within our knowledge, is maternity. Around this sacred word cluster the joys and sorrows, the agonies and ecstasies, of the human race. The mother walks in the shadow of death that she may give another life. Upon the altar of love she puts her own life in pawn. When the world is civilized, no wife will become a mother against her will. Man will then know that to enslave another is to imprison himself.

58. To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying 'Amen' to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.

59. For all we take we must pay, but the price is cruel high.

60. Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.

61. 'I don't want to work on stuff I don't like.'

62. There are a great many ways to commit suicide you know.

63. Talk had faded with the daylight. The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools...for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

64. Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

65. Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better.

66. He looked like he could have snapped the chains that held him as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked in his face, you knew he wasn't going to do anything like that.

67. So I fancy my Muse says, when I wish to die, Oh no, Oh no, we are not yet friends enough, And Virtue also says: We are not yet friends enough.

68. Anything that affects your senses ... is your business. If you want to kill yourself through nicotine or cyanide, it's your business.

69. Any parent wants the best for their children. I am not going to make a choice for my child on the basis of what is the politically correct thing to do.

70. I know you are brave and unselfish people, making sacrifices for a great principle but I cannot join you. I believe in the present effort which the allies are making to suppress German militarism. I would approve of America going to their assistance. I would enlist to that end, if ever there be a situation where I believe I could do more with my hands than I could with my pen.

71. The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters. The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It (1917)

72. 'Milton was right:' The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery:

73. 'Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions.' 'Because they are too terrible, Sir?' 'No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into Eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see - small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope - something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom.'

74. When the Knock of the Spirit sounds we follow or perish

75. No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar. Next time anybody came gabbling to him about liberty- what did he mean next time? There wasn't going to be any next time for him. But the hell with that. If there could be a next time and somebody said let's fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I'm not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I've got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we're talking about and just how much of that liberty we're going to have. And what's more mister are you as much interested in liberty as you want me to be? And maybe too much liberty will be as bad as too little liberty and I think you're a goddamn fourflusher talking through your hat and I've already decided that I like the liberty I've got right here the liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girt I think I like that liberty better than fighting for a lot of things we won't get and ending up without any liberty at all. Ending up dead and rotting before my life is even begun good or ending up like a side of beef. Thank you mister. You fight for liberty. Me I don't care for some.

76. ''a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will'8.23

77. You are where you are today because you have chosen to be there

78. You don't have to buy from anyone. You don't have to work at any particular job. You don't have to participate in any given relationship. You can choose

79. We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French call his donnee; our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in case we do not our course is perfectly simple - to let it alone. We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common things.

80. Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No - not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping

81. Sure you have made me passing glad That you your mind so soon removed, Before that I the leisure had To choose you for my best beloved

82. Dare to be yourself.

83. Think big, or go home.

84. Why not?

85. Freedom and Destiny (1981)