Quotes & Sayings About Decisiveness

Gradually the conviction gained recognition that all knowledge about things is exclusively a working-over of the raw material furnished by the senses ... Galileo and Hume first upheld this principle with full clarity and decisiveness. — Albert Einstein

Dare to keep moving when it is a must and dare to keep waiting when you have to, but note, you shall always keep waiting if you keep waiting and you shall always keep moving when you keep moving! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The president we have today is a typical Washington politician that's prone to hyperbole and decisiveness and false outrage. And I think it's very sad - very sad to watch. — Marco Rubio

The pride Kaspar had seen in his father's eyes, despite the admonishing words about foolish acts, had branded the boy for life. 'Never be afraid.' He knew that no matter what, any choice must be made fearlessly, or else all would be lost. — Raymond E. Feist

How simple it could be! The answer to the problem of being anything was being it. How admirable Teddy was! From the ashes of his broken childhood he had formed a decision to be a cheerful person, a do-gooding scientific type with knowledge of English literature. That he had undercurrents of sadness as long and deep as a river was not the point. He had claimed a territory for himself and did not think too much about the complications. — Laurie Colwin

It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you - — Eliezer Yudkowsky

In 'Growing Stronger,' I expose my most painful moments and open my heart, thoughts and person, so that my experiences can inspire alleviation, consolation and decisiveness. — Thalia

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. — Theodore Roosevelt

One thing I've found ... the road rarely rises up to meet you until you've begun walking. — Michele Jennae

IF YOU CREATE a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow), people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying uncharted pathways and then charging down them. They will also begin to see the upside of decisiveness: The time they've saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they're on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot. — Ed Catmull

The percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long-drawn-out vacillations, and the effect of decisiveness itself makes things go and creates confidence. — Anne O'Hare McCormick

In some cases, the trust and resulting sense of certainty earned by decisiveness can override an observer's disagreement with the underlying action. It is a truism that many people voted for and supported Ronald Reagan even though they disagreed with his stance on one or more issues of importance to them. Some people seemed to respect him all the more for his strongly held views in the face of disagreement and criticism. — James Strock

Decide.

Take one of the most unsettling things you feel exist in your life and decide.

Decide to meet it with love and understanding.
Decide to meet it with a proactive spirit that believes that a solution, an ease, a peaceful resolve rests in the meeting.

Prepare your heart for what it feels like to be joyous over the result. Give life to this solution with your breath.

Let any fear be a helpmate, let it actually support and lift you to an awareness that your next opportunity for growth is revisiting you through this present unsettling because you are now more than capable and authentically ready to meet it.

Learn and value the lesson and transcend its repetitive nature. — David Ault

If a business has to be told that it needs more focus, accountability and decisiveness, there is a bigger problem at hand. — Brad Garlinghouse

The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders. — Thornton Wilder

If you can train yourself to be actionable instead of reactionary, you will break out of the negative space that is typically furnished with fear, uncertainty and inaction, and move into that peaceful zone of determination, power, decisiveness and growth. Life will become less complicated. — Carlos Wallace

Wait and see the steps you should or should not have taken, and you shall understand patience and impatience better! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

In order to answer the question "Where am I going?" one needs to work for self-improvement, to possess decisiveness, to have a will to win and dedication to achieve the goal at all cost — Sunday Adelaja

Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what's happening. — Pema Chodron

The social repression and ideological repression of women began with depriving them of education, political decisiveness, mobility and essentially creating sexual slavery. — Frederick Lenz

Reflection doesn't take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action - to be a leader. — Peter Koestenbaum

As buoyancy is not contrary to other characteristics of leadership, including decisiveness, accountability and performance standards, I don't ever think it can be self-defeating. — Kevin Allen

Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Decisiveness is the number one quality of a dynamic leader; his ability to communicate a decision with passion and integrity is an art form. — Farshad Asl

Time Management Tips: The perpetual processing of the same temptation is both dangerous and time-wasting. Cycling and recycling the same temptation (instead of rejecting such blandishment out of hand) is not only to risk one's soul, again and again, but is to bring on fatigue, so that the Adversary may be able to do indirectly what we will not let him do directly. A lack of decisiveness in dealing with temptation ties up our thought processes and prevents us from doing good with the time allotted to us. — Neal A. Maxwell

Of the various qualities of leadership, women were rated far, far ahead of men on being "honest," "intelligent," "compassionate," "outgoing," and "creative," and were considered just as "hardworking" and "ambitious" as men. Men were perceived as excelling only in being "decisive."1 The preference for men as leaders, then, suggests that the frame for respondents emphasized the role of decisiveness in leadership. — Linda Tarr-Whelan

Doctor." Gideon set one ankle on the opposite knee and settled back, creating a picture of unyielding decisiveness.
"The only way I'm keeping my hands off her is if I'm dead. Find another way to fix us."
Chapter 3 pg 50 — Sylvia Day

The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything. — Theodore Roosevelt

Almost any decision is better than no decision
just keep moving. — Danielle LaPorte

If you cannot recognize the signs of Hitlerian Power, if you do not know how to counter their efforts, if you remain confused and uncertain as your opponent makes his moves, step by step with decisiveness and intention, and your inaction allows him to come closer to power, then you have already lost and they have won, for they know the rules of the game and you do not. — Adolf Hitler

If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and e-mail records and Web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities? — Chip Heath

There are six elements of gravitas critical to leadership: grace under fire, decisiveness, emotional intelligence and the ability to read a room, integrity and authenticity (people don't like fakes), a vision that inspires others, and a stellar reputation. — Sylvia Ann Hewlett

A very difficult year is ahead of us. We must continue our efforts with decisiveness, to stay in the euro, to make sure we do not waste the sacrifices and do not turn the crisis into an uncontrolled and disastrous bankruptcy. — Lucas Papademos

The world is now aware that the most unavoidable and most dangerous weapon that exists is the blind decisiveness of a man ready to sacrifice his life for an obscure cause. — Omar Bongo

No," said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech - "there's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing - it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else. — George Eliot

Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty. — Henry Becque

If it is ever your misfortune to be attacked, alertness will have given you a little warning, decisiveness will have given you a proper course to pursue, and if that course is to counterattack, carry it out with everything you've got! Be indignant. Be angry. Be aggressive. — Jeff Cooper

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.
[The Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1995: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the District of Columbia of the Committee on Governmental Affairs (1996)] — Theodore Roosevelt

Always you find that the more decisive event wins so my father's sort of annual decisiveness which came upon him on the Day of Atonement every year, he suddenly remembered that he was Jewish. — Janet Suzman

When exercising gifted will-power, move boldly without hesitation. The reward for such decisiveness is increased confidence in what the heart knows, which the mind does not feel — T.F. Hodge

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat. — Theodore Roosevelt

I think in the immediate days after 9/11, the administration acted very, very well. I liked the decisiveness of it. — Ann Richards

[The small camera] taught me energy and decisiveness and immediacy ... The large camera taught me reverence, patience, and meditation. — Joel Meyerowitz

Sorting gets harder as time goes on
it requires a sort of ruthless decisiveness, while indecision results in endless dithering. Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven't moved may begin to need a fire. [p. 38] — Mary Catherine Bateson

The ultimate resources are EMOTIONAL STATES:
Creativity, decisiveness, passion, honesty, sincerity, love
these are the ultimate human resources and when you engage these resources you can get any other resource on earth. — Tony Robbins

It's essential you create a fiery will from within
harness that power of decisiveness
and choose to be your strongest self. — Karen Salmansohn

The one word that makes a good manager - decisiveness. — Lee Iacocca

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face. — Napoleon Hill

Great genius you already have. The super conscious mind is invariably triggered by definition, and by decisiveness. — Brian Tracy

Somehow, the road rises up to meet you Patch, when you are ready. — Michele Jennae

No, sir, Stoner said, and the decisiveness of his voice surprised him. He thought with some wonder of the decision he had suddenly made. — John Edward Williams

If she was making the right and courageous decisions, he thought, she was nonetheless unhappy and somewhat resentful about doing it — David Halberstam

His tender tone turned her heart over. She obliged, tilting her head back slightly and looking up at him in the firelit darkness. When he bent his head and his mouth met hers, she gave a little sigh, her lips parting slightly in surprise and expectation. He kissed her with the same sure decisiveness with which he did everything else, his mouth trailing to her cheek and chin and ear, returning again and again to her mouth and lingering there, his breath mingling with her own.
She felt adrift in small, sharp bursts of pleasure. Was this how a man was suppose to kiss a woman? Tenderly ... firmly ... repeatedly? His fingers fanned through her hair till the pins gave way and wayward locks spilled like black ribbon to the small of her back. In answer, her arms circled his neck, bringing him nearer, every kiss sweeter and surer than the one before. Soon they were lost in a haze of sighs and murmurs and caresses. — Laura Frantz

To move along the line of natural expectation consolidates the opponent's balance and thus increases his resisting power. In war, as in wrestling, the attempt to throw the opponent without loosening his foothold and upsetting his balance results in self-exhaustion, increasing in disproportionate ratio to the effective strain put upon him. Success by such a method only becomes possible through an immense margin of superior strength in some form-and, even so, tends to lose decisiveness. In most campaigns the dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance has been the vital prelude to a successful attempt at his overthrow. — B.H. Liddell Hart

You know, I think my biggest concern [if Mitt is elected], obviously, would just be for his mental well-being. I have all the confidence in the world in his ability, in his decisiveness and his leadership skills, in his understanding of the economy, in his understanding of what's missing right now in the economy - you know, pieces that are missing to get this jump-started. So for me I think it would just be the emotional part of it. — Ann Romney

If I Had To Sum Up In One Word The Qualities That Make Up A Good Manager, I'd Say Decisiveness. — Lee Iacocca

take the opposite approach: Voters' lack of decisiveness changes everything. Voting is not a slight variation on shopping. Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not. The naive view of democracy, which paints it as a public forum for solving social problems, ignores more than a few frictions. It overlooks the big story inches beneath the surface. When voters talk about solving social problems, they primary aim is to boost their self-worth by casting off the workaday shackles of objectivity. — Bryan Caplan

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection - most dreams are bungled - the are symbolic chains of scene and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed when we remember our dreams. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Indecision is the most unsexy thing on the planet. I don't know if I'm sexy but I think decisiveness is sexy. I also lose trust and faith in them when I realise I'm a bit on my own and that's a very disheartening feeling. — Drew Barrymore

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. — Maurice Blanchot

Indecisiveness is the number one reason for failure. Lack of ability to make a decision in a timely manner causes most people to fail with their projects and plans. Identify this challenge and decide to no longer let it be a setback from your success. — Farshad Asl

Five years ago, I said vows. And I believe in vows. I meant them, and not just when I said them out loud for an audience to hear but as a motto and a life choice. For as long as we both shall live. I hadn't anticipated the sandy flow of feeling, the yin-yang of love and dread, or the residual buildup of grievances and the slow draining of the benefit of doubt. In good times and in bad. Yes, sure, but in my naivete, I interpreted this as external; we would support each other when the world imposed and intruded. No one tells you that it's the internal that's the real challenge: those moments of decisiveness equal to taking a vow, when you feel the clawing grip of your pormises. — Julie Buxbaum

Depression affects not only mood but the nature and content of thought as well. Thinking processes almost always slow down, and decisiveness is replaced by indecision and rumination. The ability to concentrate is usually greatly impaired and willful action and thought become difficult if not impossible. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Decisiveness is the one word that makes a good manager. — Lee Iacocca

Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all. — Brian Tracy

Courage, self-reliance and decisiveness are the main traits that define a man. — Ogwo David Emenike

Luck favors the bold. Leaders must fearlessly exploit the Secret of Decisiveness. Act boldly at critical moments. — Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness. — Antonin Artaud

If I had to sum up in a word what makes a good manager, I'd say decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computers to gather the numbers, but in the end you have to set a timetable and act. — Lee Iacocca

DECISIVENESS SEPARATES GREAT LEADERS FROM DREAMERS AND TALKERS. — Jack Canfield

One evening an elder Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us. One is Fear. It carries anxiety, concern, uncertainty, hesitancy, indecision and inaction. The other is Faith. It brings calm, conviction, confidence, enthusiasm, decisiveness, excitement and action." The grandson thought about it for a moment and then meekly asked his grandfather: "Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee replied, "The one you feed. — Gary Keller

For an instant he felt nettled at the irony, the lightest shadow of a snub, with which she had met his decisiveness, and at the way he had risen to her quick glance. But it was only an infinitesimal clink of foils and as the bowing maitre d'hotel led them through the crowded room, it was forgotten as Bond in her wake watched the heads of the diners turn to look at her. — Ian Fleming

It's a sin."
"How do you know?"
"Because it feels like one," she managed to say.
He laughed quietly and pulled her hips farther toward him with a decisiveness that drew a little yelp from her.
"In that case ... I never sin by half measures. — Lisa Kleypas

The essential task ahead requires formulating an adequate doctrine, upholding principles that have been thoroughly studied, and, beginning from these, giving birth to an Order. This elite, differentiating itself on a plane that is defined in terms of spiritual virility, decisiveness, and impersonality, and where every naturalistic bond loses its power and value, will be the bearer of a new principle of a higher authority and sovereignty; it will be able to denounce subversion and demagogy in whatever form they appear and reverse the downward spiral of the top-level cadres and the irresistible rise to power of the masses. From this elite, as if from a seed, a political organism and an integrated nation will emerge, enjoying the same dignity as the nations created by the great European political tradition. Anything short of this amounts only to a quagmire, dilettantism, irrealism, and obliquity. — Julius Evola

In negotiating with rejected lovers or husbands, women must stop thinking they can make everyone happy. In many cases of harassment and stalking, it is clear that the woman never learned how to terminate the fantasy which requires resolution and decisiveness on their part. Wavering, dithering, or passive hysterical fear will only intensify or prolong pursuit. — Camille Paglia

We associate leadership with decisiveness. That perception of leadership pushes people to make decisions fairly quickly, lest they be seen as dithering and indecisive. — Daniel Kahneman

Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community. — Robert Bly