Quotes & Sayings About Choice And Chance

Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them
and then, the opportunity to choose. — C. Wright Mills

Change isn't a choice; it's already happening. You are atoms and molecules in motion ... you can't avoid change; you ARE change. The question is whether you will EMBRACE the power of change to enhance your life or continue to exhaust yourself in the pointless endeavor to halt it. — Steve Maraboli

Life turns on small choices.
A last-minute decision to take a shortcut over a snowy pass.
A shrugging dismissal of the odd-looking man in the long coat standing off to one side.
A decision to postpone a physical exam till a less busy time.
A word spoken with the best intentions.
Looking back, after the lives are destroyed, the blood spilt, the families shattered, and even the courses of nations changed forever, the mistakes that started the doomsday clock ticking down often seem minor, even innocent-even virtuous. So easy to make.
David Eller would give anything-no, everything-to go back and undo those mistakes. But life does not give us that chance. Like everyone else, he has no choice but to dangle from the hand of that clock, trying in vain to pull them backward as they tick inexorably toward zero. — William Carmichael

We're keeping them alive," she said. "Sweetheart, the fence, the wall, is inhumane. People are dying."
"That's their choice,"he actually said. "They come here illegally, that's the chance they take."
"When did you get so hard?" she asked, holding his face between her hands. "They're human beings like us, looking for a better life for their families. You understand that, don't you? You did it for us."
"It's a humanitarian crises," she said. "And you're part of the problem. That's why you can't sleep at night. — Luanne Rice

When I say that I am convinced of these things I speak with too much pride. Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be. — Oscar Wilde

Children understood at a very young age that doing nothing was an expression of power. Doing nothing was a choice swollen with omnipotence. It was, in fact, godly.
And this, she now realized, was the reason why the gods did nothing. Proof of their omniscience. After all, to act was to announce awful limitations, for it revealed that chance acted first, the accidents were just that
events beyond the will of the gods
and all they could do in answer was to attempt to remedy the consequences, to alter natural ends. To act, then, was an admission of fallibility. — Steven Erikson

So you believe in fate," I say.
Dr. Mann pauses thoughtfully before answering. "I believe each of us was uniquely created for a specific purpose designed by the Creator, and that, because of that, there are certain things in our lives that we are destined by Him to do. The rest, I think, is soft clay: left entirely to the defining influences of choice, chance, and circumstance. And luck! Don't forget luck. — Lauren Miller

Life is like a game of bridge ... we did not invent the game or design the cards;
we did not frame the rules and we cannot control the dealing. The cards are dealt out to us whether they be good or bad... But we can play the game well or play it badly. A skillful player may have poor hand and win the game. A bad player may have a good hand and yet make a mess of it. Our life is a mixture of necessity and freedom, chance and choice... we may not change events but we can change our approach to events. — Dr. S Radhakrishnan

Over the years, I've come to recognize that democratization in Ethiopia is not just a matter of choice. It's a matter of national survival. I am deeply convinced that we either democratize and have a good chance of surviving, or if we fail to do so, we disintegrate. — Meles Zenawi

There is no longer a clear, bright line dividing America's domestic concerns and America's foreign policy concerns ... If we want America to stay on the right track, if we want other people to be on that track and have the chance to enjoy peace and prosperity, we have no choice but to try to lead the train. — William J. Clinton

But sometimes life gives us those rare moments where we do see chance as it's happening. And in those moments, we have a choice. And sometimes we have to take a risk. And it's scary. It makes us vulnerable. But I know now it's worth it. — Jessi Kirby

Love is an active construction, and choice, not just an encounter that happens by chance. — Masha Tupitsyn

I always knew that I wanted to work and I knew I wanted to be a singer and an actor. I knew that every choice I made would help me get to that point. So the better the choices I made, the more of a chance I would have to get to where I wanted to be. — Lea Michele

Politics I take to be the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a set of people whom chance or choice have brought together. In this sense, families, clubs, and learned societies have their 'politics'. But the communities in which this manner of activities is pre-eminent are the hereditary co-operative groups, many of them of ancient lineage, all of them aware of a past, a present and a future, which we call states. — Michael Joseph Oakeshott

The most influential choices you make for your health occur in the grocery store. Once you put something in your cart, good or bad, it is likely to end up in your stomach. Even if you feel some remorse about your poor choice in the store, when you get home, your willpower stands little chance. After all, you paid for it, and it is only a few steps away at that point. — Tom Rath

Technological transformations give you the chance to set up new and ambitious ventures. That's what I did with FastWeb and that is what we are doing with Babelgum. This is much more than TV because we are making the content available all across the world and you have an open platform with freedom of choice. — Silvio Scaglia

Sometimes I have no choice but to wear my hair and I try to make it look as normal as possible, but no, there's no chance. — Randall Park

With your own wish and desires, never accept alternative offered chances, only stand strong to making your own choice into reality. You will stand a chance to be what you wish to be with your own words. — Auliq Ice

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made
and he had to make a choice
would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end. At that moment, the two Stillmans started on their way again. The first turned right, the second turned left. Quin craved an amoeba's body, wanting to cut himself in half and run off in two directions at once. (Chapter 7) — Paul Auster

It was scary," she said. "Win was scary." "He also saved your life." "Yes." "It's what Win does. He's good at it - the best I've ever seen. Everything with him is black and white. He has no moral ambiguities. If you cross the line, there is no reprieve, no mercy, no chance to talk your way out of it. You're dead. Period. Those men came to harm you. Win wasn't interested in rehabilitating them. They made their choice. The moment they entered your apartment they were doomed." "It sounds like the theory of massive retaliation," she said. "You kill one of ours, we kill ten of yours." "Colder," Myron said. "Win's not interested in teaching a lesson. He sees it as extermination. They're no more than pestering fleas to him. — Harlan Coben

How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? — Hunter S. Thompson

There's never been a choice. And I know it must be hard for you to believe in my love after everything I've done that's hurt you, but it's true. God, it's true. And if you'll give me another chance to prove it to you, I'll do anything. Anything. — Mia Sheridan

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. — Charlie Kaufman

Chess lied to herself every day; it was just something she did, like taking her pills or making sure she had a pen in her bag. Little lies, mostly. Insignificant. Of course there were big ones there, too, like telling herself that she was more than just a junkie who got lucky enough to possess a talent not everyone had. That she was alone by choice and that she was not terrified of other people because they couldn't be trusted, because they carried filth in their minds and pain in their hands and they would smear both all over her given half the chance. — Stacia Kane

PROBLEM 1. Assume yourself richer by $300 than you are today. You are offered a choice between A. A sure gain of $100, or [72%] B. A 50% chance to gain $200 and a 50% chance to lose $0. [28%] PROBLEM 2. Assume yourself richer by $500 than you are today. You are offered a choice between A. A sure loss of $100, or [36%] B. A 50% chance to lose $200 and a 50% chance to lose $0. — Richard H. Thaler

Sometimes you wonder, I mean really wonder.
I know we make our own reality, and we always have a choice, but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road, and are there two preordained paths that are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that way
there's a chance, and it's very strange sometimes. — John Lennon

a life

a journey
a play
a sojourn

a challenge
a gift
a curse

a chance
a choice
a recess

a struggle
a stride
a voyage

a puddle
a stream
a sea

a pain
a pleasure
a penance

a prayer
a sport
a search

it's all about
living in an eternal presence,
in the moment,
right here and right now. — Chandrashekar

Life is about choices and chances. You make a choice and take a chance. — Truth Devour

Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. — Jeanette Winterson

No one falls in love by choice, it is by chance. No one stays in love by chance, it is by work. And no one falls out of love by chance, it is by choice. — Unknown

However,
when given the chance, many people choose cocaine over love. I wouldn't say that's a
bad choice. The endorphins released during infatuation are similar to heroin. OxyContin,
"the cuddling hormone," most often found in new mothers and newlyweds, is like ecstasy;
every touch tingles. I think I read that somewhere. Love exists in powder. Love exists in
pills. We are all addicts. — Pete Wentz

As an owner, you have a choice. Do you want to adopt a vision that you think is real sharp and real cutting edge and could get you from good to great - has a chance - or do you want to just say the organization is not about that, and we're not going to try to adopt a new coaching philosophy and vision. — Jeffrey Lurie

We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives
the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice whic influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be put down to pur chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy
or unhappy
we were going to be. — Alexander McCall Smith

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part. — Gerhard Richter

Differentiation separates, but it also gives us the chance for reunification. Separation gives us the chance to truly value the experience of oneness, in much the same way that both light and shadow are needed to create the perception of form. If we had simply kept oneness from the beginning of time, there would have been no chance to choose oneness through our own free will, which is the choice we have to make right now. — Ilchi Lee

You have no choice but to look at your decisions and accomplishments - or lack of them - and decide for yourself if you did all that you could do. And you panic just a little, wishing for one more chance at all the beautiful moments you didn't appreciate, or for one more day with the person you didn't love quite enough. You also wonder in those frantic, fleeting seconds, as your spirit shoots through a dark tunnel, if heaven exists on the other side, and if so, what you will find there. What will it look like? What color will it be? Then you see a light - a brilliant, dazzling light - more calming and loving than any words can possibly describe, and everything finally — Julianne MacLean

Actually the choice is simple. When your child decides to love a new person, you can either see it as a chance to hate some people - the person they choose and their families. However, you can also see it as a chance to love some more people. And since when did loving more become a bad thing? — Chetan Bhagat

Evans understood that if Nakamura chose, it would be indiscriminately and their number would include the sickest - and perhaps most likely the sickest, because they were of least use to Nakamura - and that all of them would die. If, on the other hand, he, Dorrigo, chose, he could pick the fittest, the ones he thought had the best chance of living. And most would die anyway. That was his choice: to refuse to help the agent of death, or to be his servant. — Richard Flanagan

It was my choice or chance or curse To adopt the cause for better or worse And with my worldly goods & wit And soul & body worship it - — Edgar Allan Poe

Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open a wide spectrum of options for choice and commitment. It is not an educated intimidation with good books, good stories, and good works, but the liberation of fearful hearts so that words can find roots and bear ample fruit ... .The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free ... .not a subtle invitation to adopt the life style of the host, but the gift of a chance for the guest to find his own. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

There is not a day that we do not have a chance to choose between the devil's clever promises and God's sure Word. — Billy Graham

I am an optimist and I believe that together we shall be able now to make the right historical choice so as not to miss the great chance at the turn of centuries and millenia and make the current extremely difficult transition to a peaceful world order. — Mikhail Gorbachev

For now," Amelie said. "Take her home. And
"
"Say nothing
yes, yes, I heard you the first seven hundred times," Myrnin said, much too sharply. "I'm ancient. I'm not deaf. "
Amelie's cold expression deepened, and her gray eyes took on an unpleasant reddish glitter. "Do you think I find this a joking matter?"
"Maybe you should," he said. "And maybe you should have cut off the old man's head when you had the chance. Absolutely no one would have argued with that choice. Merely walling him up, to increase his suffering and create an example
that was unmerciful, and, worse, it was sloppy. I believe that flapping sound you hear is pigeons, coming home to roost. — Rachel Caine

A man should choose a wife with a careful eye to his own personal gratification, in the same way that he chooses horses or wine
perfection or nothing.
And the woman?
The woman has really no right of choice, she must mate wherever she has the chance of being properly maintained. A man is always a man
a woman is only a man's appendage, and without beauty she cannot put forth any just claim to his admiration or support. — Marie Corelli

Life gives you a chance and lots of opportunities to drop it, you might be either the best one or the rest one, choice is all yours. — M.H. Rakib

I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People - powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders. I — Elizabeth Warren

Honestly i don't understand the rousing of romance all that well. i used to believe in this thing called fate, or destiny. a romantic romeo and juliet, monet and veronica, etc. but now i feel jaded, maybe agnostic to the idea.
but choice used to seem so unromantic, as if some mystic force was not behind the meeting of 2 beautiful individuals. but now i think choice is the greater of the two simply for this fact: by choosing someone you are saying that out of all the people in the entire world i have decided that i want you apart of my life in perpetuum, for the rest of my life, and no one else.
no haphazard circumstance, no chance meetings where distant planets align. it's simply two rational individuals who make a choice and an effort to remain together. — Stephen Christian

Only one in four has a chance at making it ... And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me. I was going to live. I was the guy. — Anthony Bourdain

Each person's destiny is not a matter of chance; it's a matter of choice. It's determined by what we say, what we do, and whom we trust. — S. Truett Cathy

To all users of technology who are willing to take a chance, make a choice, and try a new way of doing things so that we can nurture and enjoy a happy, healthy planet. - K.M. — Katherine Murray

Either you set your goals and, in doing so, have your life governed by choice or you do nothing and have your life governed by chance. — Robin S. Sharma

Pay close attention. Listen carefully. Let's look at what happens when fear is in charge.

With fear in charge, you can never fully relax, let your guard down, be your true self. You can't open up because you are afraid of how people will respond if they were to meet the real you. When fear is in charge, you simply cannot take that chance. Fear will not allow honesty, fear despises spontaneity, and fear refuses to believe in you. Fear may mean well, but it ruins everything by overprotecting you, insisting that you stay hidden and keep a low profile, that your time is coming....sometime later.

Fear is bold, but insists that you be timid. Take a chance and there will be hell to pay: fear will call on its dear friend, shame, to meet you on the other side of your risk taking, to tell you what you should not have done. Fear will trip you, tackle you, smother you, do whatever it takes to cause you to hesitate, to stop you. In this way fear is fearless. — Thom Rutledge

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared — Steven Pinker

Success and happiness are not matters of chance but choice. — Zig Ziglar

If everything was determined
by the common human condition, by social and cultural categories, and by chance, it would be useless to reflect on ways to make one's life excellent. Fortunately there is enough room for personal initiative and choice to make a real difference. And those who believe this are the ones with the best chance to break free from the grip of fate. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What's compelling isn't simply that Facebook enabled us to be our own Big Brother; what's compelling is how we jumped at the chance. We were given a choice, and we rejected privacy. — Dave Cicirelli

His insane gamble of granting Mollie breathing room with Colonel Lowe had finally paid off. Mollie had had the chance to know both men, and she had made her choice. She'd come back to him, and she wasn't leaving again. — Elizabeth Camden

I was risking the chance at a new life on uncertainty, and the only thing that was certain was that if I ever returned, I'd come back to no life at all. I collapsed to the floor. I had made my choice. — Karina Halle

It came to me ... that I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing ... a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice. — John Fowles

You were the one who changed us when you left me in the tree house; and you keep thinking that if you push hard enough, you can make everything go back to before that moment. It doesn't work that way. Give me a chance to choose you. — Kiera Cass

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors. — Aldous Huxley

Mind is a duality; it is always split. There is no single point on which the mind agrees in totality. Half of the mind will agree and half of the mind will disagree, and whatever you choose, you are choosing only the half. The remaining half is going to take revenge. The unchosen part, the left over, will wait for its chance to show you that whatever you have chosen is wrong. But it does not matter which part you choose. Choice itself is wrong. — Rajneesh

I think about my choice. Either outcome is bleak. If I stay and live through high school, go to college, get a job, what will ever change? This blackness inside will never go away. I don't make friends; I'll always be alone. If I go, at least there's hope of peace. Chance of a new and better life on the other side. — Julie Anne Peters

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt,
Like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown. — Ayn Rand

It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force. — Alexander Hamilton

Second, we will give our fellow citizens the skills they need for the jobs of today and the careers of tomorrow. When it comes to the school your child will attend, every parent should have a choice, and every child should have a chance. — Mitt Romney

Your second choice is to give me the chance to be everything you want in a husband and father. I want us to be a family, Ruby. I want to grow with you, learn with you, be with you. I want to love you and our baby, but whichever option you choose I want to be near this child forever. I'm done running from love. I've found it in you and I'm here to stay. I love you, Ruby Fleming."
-- Christo — Barbara DeLeo

We don't need to identify concrete solutions to all our problems. We don't need to create the illusion of control amid uncertain circumstances. We need to accept that our biggest problem is fighting the way things are, and then consciously choose to stop battling ourselves. We have to choose to be in this moment instead of scheming toward something better. This moment is a new opportunity to let go of everything that's stressing us. This moment is a new chance to take a deep breath so that we don't feel so overwhelmed. This moment is a tiny lifetime, all in itself, and we have the choice to live it. — Lori Deschene

The Circle had been less than thrilled by its choice, but we'd finally come to terms. As in, they were no longer trying to play Whac-A-Mole with my head. Only now they seemed to think they had the right to make sure that nobody else did, either. That was a problem, because the vampires felt the same way and the Senate didn't share well. — Karen Chance

You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I feel like I'm waiting here. Waiting for something that hasn't happened yet. Something that isn't yet. But that's all I feel and nothing else. I don't know if I even exist. And then someone flips a switch and the light is gone, the room is gone, the weightlessness is gone. I want to ask to wait, because I wasn't finished yet, but I don't have a chance. There is no gentle pulling. No coaxing. No choice. I'm wrenched out. Yanked, as if my head is being snapped back. I'm in the dark and everything is pain. There are too many sensations at once. Every nerve ending is on fire. Like the shock of being born. And then, there are flashes of everything. Color, voices, machines, harsh words. The pain doesn't flash. The pain is constant, steady, never-ending. It's the only thing I know. I don't want to be awake anymore. — Katja Millay

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago. And — Greg Iles

Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. It's up to you to decide what you are worth, how you matter, and how you make meaning in the world. No one else has your gifts
your set of talents, ideas, interests. You are an original. A masterpiece. — Regina Brett

When we seek to understand what another appreciates about their own way of life, and when we take the chance to see their life and the beauty of their culture though their eyes, this action and choice can eliminate feelings of both fear and separation and bond us deeply. — Jasmuheen

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath
all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each? — H. Rider Haggard

If you didn't have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn't have options, you made some. You couldn't just let this world happen to you ... he didn't see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and this one slim chance. — Ann Brashares

You must take your chance boy. The choice has been all yours. — Anthony Burgess

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all. — Vladimir Nabokov

Life is not a matter of choices! Life is handed to you, a couple of cards that have cycled through the grimy hands of hundreds of players before you. There are no aces hidden up your sleeve. There is no shortcut to success and happiness. Sleight of hand will only earn you a bloody nose and a thrashing in the alley outback. So instead, you play the few good cards you have and do what you can with the bad, and you play fair. There is no choice. — Kelseyleigh Reber

Life is a choice. Your choices each day determine what outcomes happen in your life. It is by choice, not by chance, that will determine your life. An Unstoppable Life begins by taking responsibility for your choices. — Thomas Narofsky

And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I — Hunter S. Thompson

Fighting can be like champagne. It can go to the head of a coward as quickly as of a hero. Anyone has the ability to be brave on a battlefield; when you are forced with the choice of: Be brave or ... be killed.
You may not realize it, but most of us have the chance to be heroes off the battlefield. When we take a stance and find our inner courage, instead of looking the other direction when we encounter evilness or oppression. — Jose N. Harris

I know it. Just as I know if you made it a choice between you and me, I wouldn't stand a chance. — Nora Roberts

Success is not an accident. It is the result of your attitude and your attitude is a choice. Hence sucess is a matter of choice and not chance. — Shiv Khera

It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance. — Ally Condie

Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. ("The Vane Sisters") — Vladimir Nabokov

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace. — Rebecca Solnit

Sometimes we have one chance, to ride that wave, one opportunity to jump on, take a deep breath and feel the rush of adrenaline. . . don't miss your chance. — Heidi Reagan

Choice not chance dictates direction, and passion strengthens fortitude — Joshuah Buckle

Every family should have the right to spend their money, after tax, as they wish, and not as the government dictates. Let us extend choice, extend the will to choose and the chance to choose. — Margaret Thatcher

From both my families, I've learnt important things.

From my family of chance, I learnt what it was like to be alone and unrecognized, to be perceived through the prism of delusion, a lost soul marooned in the belly of bedlam. I learned the beauty and power of language, but also its capacity for subtle perfidy, how it can be used to subvert and distort reality, to sanction cruelty and sugarcoat abuse. I learned that words can be the path to freedom or just another lock on the caged door.

And from my family of choice, I learn on a daily basis about love and loyalty, about burdens shared and intimacies treasured, about forgiveness and atonement and joy. I learn about the gift of a difficult childhood and the fact that 'it's never too late to have a happy one. — Lucy Taylor

The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom. — Margaret Thatcher

Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly - because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god and there's always the chance that a folly will. — Desiderius Erasmus

You are not here by chance, but by choice: God's choice. He has designed you with a purpose and for a purpose in order to advance His rule in this sinful and fallen world that He originally designed to be holy and pure. No one else can do what God has planned for you to do and running away from this, as Jonah found out, will not bring peace and rest. Only His plans for you will give you hope not despair, and they will lead you into a good future, not a dead end wilderness of wasted life and — Greg Haslam

Real success isn't just a matter of chance or choice. What really matters, before you make a choice, is that you clarify and choose what really matters. — Tony Dovale

Getting an education is a running leap towards becoming filthy rich in Asia. This is no secret. But like many desirable things, simply being well known does not make it easily achieved. There are forks in the road to wealth that have nothing to do with choice or desire or effort, forks that have to do with chance, and in your case, the order of your birth is one of these. Third means you are not heading back to the village. Third means you are not working as a painter's assistant. Third also means you are not, like the fourth of you three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree. — Mohsin Hamid

In the forest, I thought I'd made the wrong choice. I thought she had the Tennyson poem because it was a Rising poem, and I'd missed my chance to be in the rebellion with her. — Ally Condie

If it's a choice between selling a million Pocket Planners and getting the chance to be with you, I'll figure out some other way to get this product off the ground. — Bella Andre

From the age of four, I was a huge comic fan and still am. When Lost in Space came along it was like being in a huge comic so we jumped at the chance of being part of that project and it proved to be a good choice. — Bill Mumy

They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever ... and the other one scared me out of my mind. — Frederik Pohl