Undecided Quotes & Sayings

Below the mill the rivers merge. First they flow close beside each other, undecided, overawed by their longed-for intimacy, and then they fall into each other and get lost in one another. The river that flows out of this melting pot by the mill is no longer either the White or the Black, but it is powerful and effortlessly drives the mill wheel that grinds the grain for bread.
Primeval lies on both the White and Black rivers and also on the third one, formed out of their mutual desire. The river arising from their confluence below the mill is called The River, and it flows on calm and contented. — Olga Tokarczuk

She'd led her father to believe she was undecided in her profession when in actuality she quickly became one of Beckett's most trusted enforcers. — Debra Anastasia

Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote. — James Surowiecki

The Government simply cannot make up their mind or they cannot get the prime minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful for impotency. And so we go on preparing more months more years precious perhaps vital for the greatness of Britain for the locusts to eat. - Speaking in the Address in Reply debate, after giving some specific instances of Germany's war preparedness — Winston S. Churchill

The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, "Where is the best place to go to?" He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages
heaven for climate, and hell for society. — Mark Twain

Your body has something in the neighborhood of 40 trillion cells - quite a consulting committee. Call on it when you're confused or undecided. Relax quietly and ask your body what it has to say. — Victoria Moran

There are no undecideds. There are only people that decided to be undecided. — Bogdan Vaida

When you're so undecided, it's better not to do anything, the right course of action is to take no action at all — Mary Kennedy

Everybody has noticed the way cats stop and loiter in a half-open door. Hasn't everyone said to a cat: "For heaven's sake, why don't you come in?" With opportunity half-open in front of them, there are men who have a similar tendency to remain undecided between two solutions, at the risk of being crushed by fate abruptly closing the opportunity. The overprudent, cats as they are, and because they are cats, sometimes run more danger than the bold. — Victor Hugo

Where one is hopelessly undecided as to what to say, there (as Confucius would have said, if they had given him the opportunity) silence is golden. — Lewis Carroll

Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. — Winston S. Churchill

Prayer works (unless God has a different plan for you, that is different than what you want). Pray now. It works best if God is undecided. — Juanita Ray

Obama's major accomplishment is himself. This can be an effective argument to make to undecided voters and something Obama has to artfully address. — Emily Yoffe

Nevertheless, four years later, at the end of August 2004, a Zogby poll discovered the critical fact that 57 percent of the undecided voters in that year's election would rather have a beer with George Bush than with John Kerry.
The question was odd enough on its face, but a nation to which it would matter is odder still. Be honest. Consider all the people with whom you've tossed back a beer. How many of them would you trust with nuclear launch codes? — Charles P. Pierce

Most people fail at whatever they attempt because of an undecided heart. Should I? Should I not? Go forward? Go back? Success requires the emotional balance of a committed heart. When confronted with a challenge, the committed heart will search for a solution. The undecided heart searches for an escape.
A committed heart does not wait for conditions to be exactly right. Why? Because conditions are never exactly right. Indecision limits the Almighty and His ability to perform miracles in your life. He has put the vision in you
proceed. To wait, to wonder, to doubt, to be indecisive is to disobey God. -Andy Andrews, The Traveler's Gift — Andy Andrews

Life is so brief and time is a thief when you're undecided. — Rod Stewart

And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever. — Thomas Hobbes

I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs. — Bertrand Russell

Then they began to say: 'Yes, but how can we know what is God's Word, and what is right or wrong? We must learn this from the Pope and the councils.' Very well then, let them conclude and say what they please, yet I will reply, you cannot put your confidence in that nor thus satisfy your conscience, for you must determine this matter yourself, for your very life depends upon it. Therefore God must speak to your heart: This is God's Word; otherwise you are undecided. — Martin Luther

Naturally, the significant results that legitimize a mathematical theory take time to derive, and then even more time to be fully accepted, and of course throughout this time the Insanity-v.-Genius question remains undecided, probably even for the mathematician himself, so that he's developing his theory and cooking his proofs under conditions of enormous personal stress and doubt, and sometimes isn't even vindicated in his own lifetime, etc. — David Foster Wallace

You are only earning the life you get when your inaction allows people to decide for you. — Shannon L. Alder

-Do you want me to leave?
-Yes
-Do you want me to stay?
-Yes
-Do you love me?
-Yes
-Do you want me?
-No
-Then leave me
-I can't
-Then stay with me
-I can't, I can't, I can't
*Equation of a fucked up relationship — Malak El Halabi

Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle — Louis Althusser

If you think all these terrible things about Obama, he asked the woman, how can you possibly be undecided?

Because if McCain dies, Palin would be president, she said. — John Heilemann

It is only fair to add that you should be undecided about spiritual causes too. By this I mean that you can't immediately say that there is one core sin that has caused your depression. Some people race toward this explanation; they hope that once they discover that sin, everything will change. Others run from this perspective; they think spiritual explanations are prehistoric and misguided. The truth is in the middle of these two poles. Sin can certainly be a cause of depression, but you must be careful about connecting the dots between the two. If you are being honest, you will always find sin in your life. Everyone does. That doesn't mean that sin caused your depression. — Edward T. Welch

Feller was an ebullient man, who would rather be wrong than undecided. — Paul Halmos

If you have to convince someone to stay with you then they have already left. — Shannon L. Alder

That our government should have been maintained in its original form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away. Through that period, it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now, it is understood to be a successful one. — Abraham Lincoln

I feel happy, I feel sad, I feel like running through the walls
I'm overjoyed, I'm undecided, I don't know who I am
Well maybe I'm not perfect, at least I'm working on it — Paramore

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness. — John Keats

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. — Laurence J. Peter

When we think of failure; failure will be ours. If we remain undecided nothing will ever change. All we need to do is want to achieve something great and then simply to do it. Never think of failure, for what we think, will come about. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs. — George Saunders

Perhaps, it is better to be decided than undecided. But it is certainly the best to stay decidedly undecided. — Raheel Farooq

If any man is not sure that he is in Christ, he ought not to be easy one moment until he is sure. Dear friend, without the fullest confidence as to your saved condition, you have no right to be at ease, and I pray you may never be so. This is a matter too important to be left undecided. — Charles Spurgeon

I've been largely undecided about everything for most of my life. I can barely commit to a phone bill ... Somewhere along the line it has become my career due to continuing work. — Robert Sheehan

Often undecided whether to desert a sinking ship for one that might not float, he would make up his mind to sit on the wharf for a day. — Max Aitken

Without constant practice, the officers will be nervous and undecided when mustering for battle; without constant practice, the general will be wavering and irresolute when the crisis is at hand.] — Sun Tzu

"Undecided," while running for re-election to state Senate in 1998, in response to an Outlines questionnaire asking, "Do you favor legalizing same-sex marriage?" — Barack Obama

He had never in his life felt so undecided about so many things, and he wanted to cry. — Stephen King

In the end, the tenses of the verbs settled into a common groove, the persons of the narrators, first and third (the latter with so many variants and identities), became one, and events thronged toward a day that began uncertainly and remained undecided, with a light gray film covering the sky. — Filip Florian

Pride and curiosity are the two scourges of our souls. The latter prompts us to poke our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided. — Michel De Montaigne

The World is not enough used to this way of writing, to the moment. It knows not that in the minutiae lie often the unfoldings ofthe Story, as well as of the heart; and judges of an action undecided, as if it were absolutely decided. — Samuel Richardson

A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind
made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it
is open. People close an undecided mind because they're trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped. — John Barnese

Superficial and emotional subject might sway undecided voters. — Harold Holzer

Stormgren had walked to his desk and was fidgeting with his famous uranium paperweight. He was not nervous - merely undecided. — Arthur C. Clarke

The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars. — Erwin Chargaff

Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided. — Michel De Montaigne

I don't want fleeting friendships or relationships or passion in life, give me fleeting moments in coffee shops and walks by the water but I will never be satisfied with empty kinships that are fleeting & undecided. Those connections are what make us all human and I dare not settle my wild little heart for something of so little depth. — Nikki Rowe

We all do don't we? We are consumed with our own mortality. Some people eat right and exercise to preserve their lives, others drink and do drugs daring fate to take theirs, and then there are the floaters - the ones who try to ignore their mortality altogether because they're afraid of it."
"Which are you?"
He set down his knife and looked at me.
"I've been all three. And now I'm undecided. — Tarryn Fisher

What the fuck are you doing with your life?"
"Dating hookers, learning the gay, housing criminals, pissing off my fellow cops, and taking in what everyone says is a cat, but which I'm definitely sure is not a cat. I'm undecided on its actual species. I think it's a cross between a rat and some kind of alien life - — Dani Alexander

Our campaigns have not grown more humanistic because our candidates are more benevolent or their policy concerns more salient. In fact, over the last decade, public confidence in institutions-- big business, the church, media, government-- has declined dramatically. The political conversation has privileged the nasty and trivial. Yet during that period, election seasons have awakened with a new culture of volunteer activity. This cannot be credited to a politics inspiring people to hand over their time but rather to campaign, newly alert to the irreplaceable value of a human touch, seeking it out. Finally campaigns are learning to quantify the ineffable - the value of a neighbor's knock, of a stranger's call, the delicate condition of being undecided-- and isolate the moment where a behavior can be changed, or a heart won. Campaigns have started treating voters like people again. — Sasha Issenberg

* Even though the restriction couldn't be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided. — Bryan Stevenson

I cannot stand objections. They make me so undecided. — Elizabeth Gaskell

But lying in bed just before going to sleep is the worst time for organized thinking; it is the best time for free thinking. Ideas drift like clouds in an undecided breeze, taking first this direction and then that. — E.L. Konigsburg

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people - people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.
[Letters of Note; Troy (MI, USA) Public Library, 1971] — E.B. White

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible. — Leah Raeder

You sound skeptical," kohler said. "I thought you were a religious symbologist. Do you not believe in miracles?"
"I'm undecided on miracles," Langdon said. Particularly those that take place in science labs.
"Perhaps miracle is the wrong word. I was simply trying to speak your language"
"My language?" Langdon was suddenly uncomfortable. "Not to disappoint you, sir, but study religious symbology-I'm a academic, not a priest."
Kohler slowed suddenly and turned, his gaze softening a bit. "Of course. How simple of me. One does not need to have cancer to analyse it's symptoms. — Dan Brown

When a man plays with your heart it is for one of two reasons: He knows he can or he is undecided. — Shannon L. Alder

I personally feel very undecided whether it is better for a woman to stay and look after the home or go out to a job. — Geoffrey Howe

Conscience, the organ of feeling which dominates us and of the opinions which rule us, is presumptuous in the strong, timid in the weak and unfortunate, uneasy in the undecided. — Luc De Clapiers

When words don't add up in love, it is because of six possible reasons:
1. They are afraid to tell you the truth because you will leave them.
2. They enjoy being a liar or playing people because of ego reasons and/or control.
3. They don't know the truth themselves.
4. They are undecided.
5. They refuse to let their guard down and be vulnerable because you or someone else have hurt them tremendously.
6. You are not being told all the information because of a break down in communication. — Shannon L. Alder

He was still undecided. It depended on how you thought of God. If God is nature, then God doesn't care, since nature doesn't care. But if, as the mystics understood, God is the best of man and within man, then God cares, since man does. — Pearl Abraham

She is vaguely satisfied; in fact she is on the cusp of complete satisfaction, she teeters there, undecided. To give into complete satisfaction is to allow that it can disappear as quickly as it arrived. Once you feel it, you will want it forever. And you cannot have it forever. Because life is not perfect. — Jami Attenberg

I'd say, [writing memoir] not so much a model, but maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice. — Cornel West

When confronted with a challenge, the committed heart will search for a solution. The undecided heart searches for an escape. — Andy Andrews

Oh, there are plenty of people," the Duc used to observe, "who never misbehave save when passion spurs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and, thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to remorse, they end their days in such a way there is no telling just what roles they have enacted on earth. Such persons," he would continue, "must surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire life is spent detesting in the morning what they did the evening before. Certain to repent of the pleasures they taste, they take their delight in quaking, in such sort they become at once virtuous in crime and criminal in virtue. — Marquis De Sade

One of the enduring myths of campaign analysis is that you can actually count the number of 'undecided' voters by asking voters if they are undecided or not. Sometimes, significant numbers of voters actually change their minds. — Jeff Greenfield

The trouble with babies is that they are made like a safe- no way to see what's inside and no guarantee that the effort will be worth the trouble. spin the numbers, crack the code, but the door won't swing open. Babies are safes on time-delay. It takes years for the door to swing open, and even when it does, the best minds are undecided as to the value of the contents — Jeanette Winterson

The Nature of Familiar Letters, written, as it were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided, must plead an Excuse for the Bulk of a Collection of this Kind. Mere Facts and Characters might be comprised in a much smaller Compass: But, would they be equally interesting? — Samuel Richardson

Close elections tend to break toward the challenger because undecided voters - having held out so long against the incumbent - are by nature looking for change. — Ron Fournier

If you cannot keep a relationship seriously, why even start one? — Mario Torres

In elections, the undecided vote is usually the deciding factor. — Evan Esar

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it. — James Boswell

The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided. — Casey Stengel

I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath. — Rene Descartes

I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them. — Johann Heinrich Lambert

No one can remain neutral regarding Jesus' resurrection.
The claim is too staggering,
the event too earthshaking,
the implications too significant
and the matter too serious.
We must either receive it or reject it as truth for us.
To remain indifferent or undecided is to reject it. — Mark Driscoll

Your body expresses yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I shall be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you might have been, what you might yet be. Never settle. Leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it. — Luce Irigaray

Crossing the meadow, he came again to the mouth of the cave where he had stood so undecided only the twilight before. Knowing what he would find, he yet wanted the final confirmation. Pushing the evergreen branches aside from the smooth rock on the right side of the opening he found, deeply carved in the rock, an Ankh, Egyptian symbol of ever-lasting life, made possible only by the union of male and female. Partly covered by lichens, weather-worn by centuries of storm, it remained as he had seen it in his first dream. It was the first cross, and on it, generation by generation, humanity had crucified itself in order that future generations might live.
("The God Wheel") — David H. Keller

I stopped in front of a florist's window. Behind me, the screeching and throbbing boulevard vanished. Gone, too, were the voices of newspaper vendors selling their daily poisoned flowers. Facing me, behind the glass curtain, a fairyland. Shining, plump carnations, with the pink voluptuousness of women about to reach maturity, poised for the first step of a sprightly dance; shamelessly lascivious gladioli; virginal branches of white lilac; roses lost in pure meditation, undecided between the metaphysical white and the unreal yellow of a sky after the rain. — Emil Dorian

In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me. — Burton Richter

was something different about his genetic structure. His ex-lover Megan Reed had once told him he was a 'super-compatible', a rare human anomaly who could accept augs without the yoke of the anti-rejection drug to keep him whole. Jensen was still undecided if that was a gift or a curse, and he couldn't stop himself from wondering if this unique quality was some loose thread left behind by other unanswered questions from his past. Questions — James Swallow

Life's existential tasks have lost the interest of reality; illusion cannot build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness which ripens to decisions. One man is curious about another, every one is undecided, and their way of escape is to say that some one must come who will do something
and then they will bet on him. — Soren Kierkegaard

Undecided thoughts' is called the mind. 'Decided thoughts' is called the intellect. — Dada Bhagwan

My judgment now is that he was vacillating and undecided in his actions. — Ulysses S. Grant

That's the trouble with trying to influence an undecided voter. First you have to find one. — Pat Sajak

Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided. — Michel De Montaigne