Quotes & Sayings About Decisions That Change Your Life

There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn't even terrible; it's possibly funny, if even that. It's embarrassing. That's all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer control my life, that the major decisions have already been made, long before I was conscious that any change was occurring. — Philip K. Dick

The measure of a man comes down to moments, spread out like dots of pain on the canvas on life. Everything you were, everything you'll someday be, resides in the small, seemingly ordinary choices of everyday life ... Each decision seems as insignificant as a left turn on an unfamiliar road when you have no destination in mind. But the decisions accumulate until you realize one day that they've made you the man that you are. — Kristin Hannah

Mom always liked to say that we hardly ever know the decisions we make that change our lives, mostly because they are little ones. You took this bus instead of that one and ended up meeting your soul mate, that kind of thing. But there was no doubt in my mind that this was one of those life-changing moments. — Rachel Hawkins

Choosing to break up your family is one of the most difficult decisions you will make in a lifetime. But once you have come to it; it will be with certainty. Certainty that you are ready to embrace the changes, the challenges and the joys of starting a new life. — Lisa Thomson

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81) — Geneen Roth

Little choices determine habit;
Habit carves and molds character
Which makes the big decisions. — Elizabeth George

Life's journey does not take place down an easy roadway, as some might imagine. It takes place inside a giant house with a million doorways. Every day of our lives we are faced with decisions to make, doorways to walk through. It can be confusing at times, like walking through a carnival maze. Some decisions we make are big, some small, but they all have consequences.. — K. Martin Beckner

This is the tattoo of life decisions."
"Tattoo of life decisions?"
"Yes. Tattoo. Marriage is the forever and permanent branding of one person to another. Sure, you can get it removed - but it's expensive, it's a process, and you're never the same after. You're scarred. It's always a part of you, visible or not. You get a tattoo with the intention of a life-long commitment. You have to defend its existence and take ownership of it in front of others for the rest of your life regardless of how it sags or droops or changes shape and color - because it will! It will change and fade, and not in an aesthetically pleasing way. — Penny Reid

Every day of your life, you change the world. Absolutely, yes, we're out to change the world. I mean, you change it whether you like it or not. You wake up and you talk to the grocer. You either kick your dog or you pet him. There's a million decisions you have every day where you change the world. — Jon Foreman

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. [ ... ] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself. — Paul Auster

We don't want to be afraid to make a choice because we're afraid to make a mistake because most decisions aren't final. Feelings change all the time. You can always change your mind and taking risks and making choices is what makes life so exciting because we never know what's going to happen. Every day something new comes our way. — Amy Poehler

Choosing one thing usually doesn't mean killing all of the other options forever. Oftentimes, you can always go back and change your mind if you want. If not, and you realize the decision did not pan out the way you had hoped, you now have a lesson for future decisions. — Chris Hardwick

Don't be adamant; don't make up your mind about all the things that don't even have anything at all to do with you. Don't be too quick to define right and wrong. Life has a way of putting the adamant person into the very situations they've made up their minds about, in order to change those very decisions. So, unless you want the things that you judge in others to happen to you, you'd better live and let live. — C. JoyBell C.

Do not stand before the fork in the road with indecisive decisions! — Michael S. McKinney

What changes your life is not learning more. What changes your life is making decisions & using your personal power & taking action. — Tony Robbins

Right ain't changed in all these years. From my maternal grandmother, Pearl C. Parker — Deborah L. Parker

Fear can change you if you let. Even a proud,strong woman can become a whimpering mess if her fear overwhelms her. Terror reaches inside you and twists your mind, colors your decisions, and limits your options. If I'm going to live my life under the constant threat of death, then I'm going to live it on my terms. And when I do die, I want people to remember me as I am, not as whatever creature my fear wants to turn me into." ... "My circumstances have taken certain choices from me. I'll be damned if I let fear take any more... — Jennifer Blackstream

At any moment the decision you make can change the course of your life forever. — Tony Robbins

He had made his decision. Later in life Ann would learn that when certain men made decisions no matter how much it might torture them afterwards they would stick with their decision. Men, she learned, would rather suffer than change their minds or their habits. They could develop elaborate systems for containing pain, sometimes so successful they would remain completely unaware of the vastness of the pain they possessed. — Susan Minot

Sometimes smallest decisions are bliss that can change our life forever — Kishore Bansal

Enjoy making decisions. You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever: the very next person you stand behind in line or sit next to on an airplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place. If you really want your life to be passionate, you need to live with this attitude of expectancy. — Anthony Robbins

Everything can turn around in a moment, if you just change your thoughts, and make different decisions. Listen to your heart. — Stacie Hammond

To all of you reading this who are on the fence about therapy because of the cost: It's smart money, spend it. That one hundred bucks an hour pays off down the road when you learn through therapy how to get out of your own way, stop self-sabotaging and thus make good decisions about relationships and career. Think of it as an investment in yourself. Simply going to therapy helps. Just carving out an hour for yourself, and deciding that you and your life are worth spending some time and money on makes a difference. That simple act alone boosts your self-esteem. Don't think of going to therapy as "I'm a broken pile of crap and need someone to fix me," think of it as "I'm going to change myself for the better instead of crying, masturbating and blaming my parents for the rest of my life. — Adam Carolla

Unknowingly we make our emotional states worse by using and relating high-intensity negative words to our experiences in life. You can use empowering/positive words to change how you think, which will then change your feelings, decisions and results. — Maddy Malhotra

Every game is winnable if you change your mind about what the prize should be and your perspective about the players at the table. — Shannon L. Alder

To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that's not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you ... Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It's revolution, invention, war. It's big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not. — Joel Stein

Don't waste your life questioning the decisions you have already made when there is nothing you can do to change them. — K.R. Fajardo

No matter how much you screw up your own life by the wrong decisions that you make, it's never too late to do the right thing and change your ways and you can teach old dogs new tricks. — Will Ferrell

Alterations in the environment place us under personal stress. Changes in our routines and the physical, social, cultural, and economic environment forces us to make decisive decisions, we cannot continue our robotic ways. We must adapt to fresh encounters with the peripheral world. Variation in our external domain brings about shocking revolutions of our internal realm of thoughts and emotions. — Kilroy J. Oldster

My request today is simple. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Find somebody, anybody, that's different than you. Somebody that has made you feel ill-will or even hateful. Somebody whose life decisions have made you uncomfortable. Somebody who practices a different religion than you do. Somebody who has been lost to addiction. Somebody with a criminal past. Somebody who dresses "below" you. Somebody with disabilities. Somebody who lives an alternative lifestyle. Somebody without a home.
Somebody that you, until now, would always avoid, always look down on, and always be disgusted by.
Reach your arm out and put it around them.
And then, tell them they're all right. Tell them they have a friend. Tell them you love them.
If you or I wanna make a change in this world, that's where we're gonna be able to do it. That's where we'll start.
Every. Single. Time. — Dan Pearce

How different the world would be if each parent could say to the child: "Who you are is terrific, all you are meant to be. And who you are, as you are, is loved by all of us. You have a source within, which is the soul, and it will express itself to you through what we call desire. Always respect the well-being of the other, but live your own journey, serve that desire, risk being that which wishes to enter the world through you, and you will always have our love, even if your path takes you away from us." Such persons would then have a powerful tool to enable them to change their lives when it was not working out for them. Such persons would be able to make difficult decisions, mindful always of the impact on others, but also determined to live the life intended by the gods who brought us here. — James Hollis

There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After ... I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would be measured. — Justina Chen

Many people say, "Well, I'd love to make a decision like that, but I'm not sure how I could change my life." They're paralyzed by the fear that they don't know exactly how to turn their dreams
into reality. And as a result, they never make the decisions that could make their lives into the masterpieces they deserve to be. I'm here to tell you that it's not important initially to know how
you're going to create a result. What's important is to decide you will find a way, no matter what. — Anthony Robbins

Many people achieved important goals in their lives, but hardly any of them seemed any happier for it. Even worse, some complained that other areas of their lives had suffered along the way. The reason is simple: they didn't change the framework components of their personality - beliefs, decisions, and other subconscious structures that are typically negatively-oriented. Those basic structures had been triggered by the fulfillment of the goal and were subsequently creating a mess in people's lives. — Nebo D. Lukovich

Sometimes it's the smallest decisions that can change your life forever. — Keri Russell

I had crossed fifty years of my life, and come across uncountable females as son, husband, father, friend in my life. Coming across several women I carefully studied most of them, and feels that I got master knowing female. But every time when my heart comes across to a female, my all knowledge on female goes to a vain. What they want? , What are they looking for? When their mind changes? When their priority changes? No one knows, in a minute they use to change decisions, if someone ask, they says it's a little thing. They never think, little things makes big or if they can't stick on little things how they can stand in important decisions. They never show they are weak, but every time they are compromising themselves. It's their big heart but impacting every around. They always think they can do anything by doing nothing. — Nutan Bajracharya

Often we suffer because we don't realize what's essential.
We may want to be rich, but the rich are lonely.
We see all those people on TV that have won the lottery and want to be at their place, but studies show that they are even more miserable after having won the big check. They don't really know what to do with all that money, take poor decisions on how to spend them, change themselves and their friends don't see them in the same way. — Lidiya K.

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding. — Martha Beck

Everything you do in life, whether it's good or bad, makes you who you are. Don't maybe your decisions to death because you can't change them. — Karyn Bosnak

Most of us are going through life without interrogating whether our decision-making processes are fit for purpose. And that's something we need to change - especially when the stakes are high and the decisions are of real import. — Noreena Hertz

A lot of things should have been, Zigmund, but they aren't. Are you going to be miserable about the things you cannot change, or do something about the things you can? — Melika Dannese Lux

A life path may change because of important decisions or events. Those were what drove my current path.
But sometimes the smallest event can also drive a turn. In the case of Eli Vanto, that force was a single, overheard word.
Chiss. Where had Cadet Vanto heard that name? What did it mean to him? He had already spoken one reason, but there might well be others. Indeed, the full truth might have several layers. But what were they?
On a ship as large as this, there was only one practical way to find out.
Thus did my path take yet another turn. As, certainly, did his. — Timothy Zahn

Your present interests are not a solid basis of a career decisions. So, stop following your passion and Do What Is Valuable.! — Moutasem Algharati

I cannot change the decisions that I have made in the past, but I can learn from them and make the most of the life that I am living now. — Christa Cervone

We are the only ones who can make decisions for ourselves about how we will handle the situations that arise in our lives. Life is not likely to get any easier, but our approach to life can change and that will make it easier. — Joyce Meyer

Maybe it's working because I'm an author, and maybe it's working because Karen works like life depends on this bookstore, or because we have a particularly brilliant staff, or because Nashville is a city that is particularly sympathetic to all things independent. Maybe we just got lucky. But my luck has made me believe that changing the course of the corporate world is possible. Amazon doesn't get to make all the decisions; the people can make them by how and where they spend their money. If what a bookstore offers matters to you, then shop at a bookstore. If you feel that the experience of reading a book is valuable, then read the book. This is how we change the world: we grab hold of it. We change ourselves. — Ann Patchett

We can't undo a single thing we have ever done, but we can make decisions today that propel us to the life we want and towards the healing we need. — Steve Maraboli

We are chained by our own control. Life is nothing more than finding the key that unlocks every part of our soul. — Shannon L. Alder

Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you're still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, 20 years ago shouldn't stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons. — Tim Ferriss

The past can leave us in an indelible bitterness. The past can erode our present joy. The past can chain our present in the cage of the past. The past can make our future look blurry. Not until we learn the real lessons of the past and dare to go for growth, we shall always live in the past though we may have today to think for a change, and we shall never forgo the past. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The only way to find peace is to face the unknown and trust that God has heard your tears. — Shannon L. Alder

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.
Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,
Even to wear such knowledge
for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions
and yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why. — Philip Larkin

To live a spiritual life does not mean that we must leave our families, give up our jobs, or change our ways of working; it does not mean that we have to withdraw from social or political activities, or lose interest in literature and art; it does not require severe forms of asceticism or long hours of prayer. Changes such as these may in fact grow out of our spiritual life, and for some people radical decisions may be necessary. But the spiritual life can be lived in as many ways as there are people. What is new is that we have moved from the many things to the kingdom of God. What is new is that we are set free from the compulsions of our world and have set our hearts on the only necessary thing. What is new is that we no longer experience the many things, people, and events as endless causes for worry, but begin to experience them as the rich variety of ways in which God makes his presence known to us. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life. — Anna Quindlen

Why Do We Procrastinate? P - postponing life R - resisting change O - overly cautious C - contemplating course of action R - reasoning and justifying A - afraid of success S - summoning up some courage T - trouble moving forward I - inability to see the outcome N - not able to trust in your abilities to make decisions A - attempting to control the situation T - time to reflect on your motives E - erodes progress — Samuel Richardson

The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity's search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun. Divine — Yuval Noah Harari