1. Top 98 Choice Quotes

In life, guidance and inspiration often come from the profound words of thinkers, leaders, and pioneers who have walked before us. Quotes distill wisdom into bite-sized pieces that can ignite motivation, provide comfort, and offer new perspectives. Whether you're in search of motivation, a fresh outlook, or a moment of reflection, our curated selection of the top 98 choice quotes will surely resonate with you. These quotes have been carefully chosen to inspire and empower, regardless of where you find yourself in your journey. Dive in and let these powerful words spark change and encourage contemplation.

1. “Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads.Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right.How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads....Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain” - Clarence Darrow

2. “Democracies should be a delirium of choices - more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer.” - B. W. Powe

3. “There is a time in every life when paths are chosen, character is forged. I could have chosen a different path. But I didn’t. I failed myself.” - Libba Bray

4. “There's small choice in rotten apples.” - William Shakespeare

5. “You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise...guided by your own virtue and highest ambition” - Phillipa Gregory

6. “Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.” - Baltasar Gracian

7. “Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.” - Madeline L'Engle

8. “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” - Aristotle

9. “What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.” - Madeleine Albright

10. “I'm single because I was born that way.” - Mae West

11. “There are times in a person's life when he or she must make a choice to believe. I choose to believe the sun will rise tomorrow. I also choose to believe that if you go to bed hungry you will wake up ready to eat. I've met a group of men in a faraway country who choose to believe that if you stand on a tree stump for an hour you will gain sympathy for trees. I am already quite sympathetic to trees, so I choose to think they are bonkers.” - Obert Skye

12. “One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.” - Michael Ignatieff

13. “What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?” - Jim Butcher

14. “Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.” - Stephen R. Covey

15. “This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.” - Terry Pratchett

16. “Choose well. Your choice is brief, and yet endless.” - Goethe

17. “Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.” - Neil Gaiman

18. “At any given moment the choice to be happy is present- we just have to choose to be happy.” - Steve Maraboli

19. “Make the choice to embrace this day. Do not let your TODAY be stolen by the ghost of yesterday or the "To-Do" list of tomorrow! It’s inspiring to see all the wonderfully amazing things that can happen in a day in which you participate.” - Steve Maraboli

20. “Don’t be disheartened by the forces of evil. Nothing can happen that God hasn’t allowed. Even resistance is all part of grand orchestration. The devil always has you right were God wants you.” - Steve Maraboli

21. “Temptation is the feeling we get when encountered by an opportunity to do what we innately know we shouldn't.” - Steve Maraboli

22. “She looked out at the other trees, and she realised that her life was one of thousands, any one of which could have been her, she had grown wherever her life had taken her, she had drifted wherever the wind had blown her.” - Dave McKean

23. “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.” - Jane Austen

24. “There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.” - Ulysses S. Grant

25. “...if there really is some day discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices - that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula - then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of that sort; for what is a man without desires, without freewill and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

26. “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” - M. Scott Peck

27. “Choices determine character.” - Brandon Mull

28. “If you want to know what a truly healthy relationship is, it’s one where both people wake up every morning and say, “I choose to be with this person.” - Robert Morrow

29. “I dare say it is rather hard to be a rat,” she mused. “Nobody likes you. People jump and run away and scream out: ‘Oh, a horrid rat!’ I shouldn’t like people to scream and jump and say: ‘Oh, a horrid Sara!’ the moment they saw me, and set traps for me, and pretend they were dinner. It’s so different to be a sparrow. But nobody asked this rat if he wanted to be a rat when he was made. Nobody said: ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a sparrow?” - Frances Hodgson Burnett

30. “I miss us too. I always have and I probably always will. Sometimes there are no happy endings. No matter what, I'll be losing something, someone. But maybe that's what it all comes down to. Love, not as a surge of passion, but as a choice to commit to something, someone, no matter what obstacles or temptations stand in the way. And maybe making that choice again and again, day in and day out, year after year,says more about love than never having a choice to make at all.” - Emily Giffin

31. “If you women continue to demand your choice to work, you will so upset the economy of this country that the time will come when you will not have a choice. You will have to work.” - Helen Andelin

32. “Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.” - Simone Weil

33. “After he wrote The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz got fervent amens from European governments as well as individual readers for insisting that the management of your focus has become one of decision-laden modernity's major challenges. Many behavioral economists and social psychologists also share his concern about what he calls "the consequences of mis-attention.” - Winifred Gallagher

34. “Stand at the crossroads if you will, but if you'll not choose, I'll move on without you” - Jacqueline Carey

35. “Staring at the stars was like staring backward in time, since some stars are so far away that their light takes millions of years just to reach us. That we see stars not as they look now, but as they were when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole concept just struck me as…amazing somehow.” - Nicholas Sparks

36. “Why are you going to choose failure when success is an option?” - Jillian Michaels

37. “Now, it is frequently asserted that, with women, the job does not come first. What (people cry) are women doing with this liberty of theirs? What woman really prefers a job to a home and family? Very few, I admit. It is unfortunate that they should so often have to make the choice. A man does not, as a rule, have to choose. He gets both. Nevertheless, there have been women ... who had the choice, and chose the job and made a success of it. And there have been and are many men who have sacrificed their careers for women ... When it comes to a choice, then every man or woman has to choose as an individual human being, and, like a human being, take the consequences.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

38. “The rule seemed to be that a great woman must either die unwed ... or find a still greater man to marry her. ... The great man, on the other hand, could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and commendable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

39. “Now I must live with the consequences of the choice I made. And I will not call it the wrong choice. That would be foolish and pointless. That choice led me to everything that has happened since, including this very moment, and the choices I make today or tomorrow or next week will lead me to the next and next present moments in my life. It is all a journey, Miss Jewell. I have come to understand that that is what life is all about-a journey and the courage and energy always to take the next step and the next without judgement about what was right and what was wrong.” - Mary Balogh

40. “I'll be damned if I apologize for the choices I've made. They were hard decisions, but I had good reasons for making them.” - Christine Feehan

41. “Maybe none of us can choose who we love, Cas. None of the lucky ones, anyway. The only choice we have is how we serve that love. And Ethan’s made his choice. What about you? Are you going to reject it, or make the best of what you’ve been given?” - Vicki Keire

42. “Sleep my little baby-ohSleep until you wakenWhen you wake you'll see the worldIf I'm not mistaken...Kiss a loverDance a measure,Find your nameAnd buried treasure...Face your lifeIts pain, Its pleasure,Leave no path untaken.” - Neil Gaiman

43. “Ah, Nothing is too late, till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

44. “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

45. “Choices may be unbelievably hard but they're never impossible. To say you have no choice is to release yourself from responsibility and that's not how a person with integrity acts.” - Patrick Ness

46. “The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.” - Holly Black

47. “In the past, humans hesitated when they took lives, even non-human lives. But society had changed, and they no longer felt that way. As humans grew stronger, I think that we became quite arrogant, losing the sorrow of 'we have no other choice.' I think that in the essence of human civilization, we have the desire to become rich without limit, by taking the lives of other creatures.” - Hayao Miyazaki

48. “He knew what it was like to love one who did not--or could not--love you back. But he'd had no choice. None of them did.” - Melissa de la Cruz

49. “Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in faces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.” - Herman Melville

50. “Everyone has the abbility to hurt. It's the choice that matters.” - Yvonne Woon

51. “Given a choice between goose egg and heartache, I would choose heartache.” - Santosh Kalwar

52. “It does not take a great supernatural heroine or magical hero to save the world.We all save it every day, and we all destroy it -- in our own small ways -- by every choice we make and every tiniest action resulting from that choice.The next time you feel useless and impotent, remember what you are in fact doing in this very moment. And then observe your tiny, seemingly meaningless acts and choices coalesce and cascade together into a powerful positive whole.The world -- if it could -- will thank you for it.And if it does not... well, a true heroine or hero does not require it.” - Vera Nazarian

53. “Need is choice come to fruition.” - S. Kelley Harrell

54. “Misperceiving that there is one correct choice is a common mistake. Coming to understand that there are usually a few good choices--and then there's the one you pick, commit to, and make great--is the best way to make flexible, optimal, good decisions in life.” - Katie Couric

55. “...the magic was a tool, though a natural, mysterious tool. In its awareness of the magic, his human nature had desired to connect with it, to use it. The whisperings were the voice of his own awakening, not the seductive call of a dark power. Using it was not corruption, but a natural extension of his being. And he could control the manner in which he used it. He would.” - Derek Donais

56. “Choice is the keynote of self-determinism. To determine anything, you must have the choice to determine. Choice to determine means that you must have the power of decision. Decision and time have a lot in common. When we have clean, clear decision, we have clean, clear time. And when we have indecision, there is an unclarity about time.” - L. Ron Hubbard

57. “Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave.” - Frances Mayes

58. “He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.” - Cormac McCarthy

59. “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

60. “The only thing that restrains you is fear, Anton Gorodetsky. For yourself, or for people—that's not important. But we are restrained by horror. And that is why we observe the Treaty.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

61. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.” - Benjamin Franklin

62. “gay marriage... always being an issue for the voting public when it should be an individual‘s private choice.” - Hauser, G.A. - Being Screwed (Action #7)

63. “Why did I, like thousands of others, have to carry a cross I hadn't chosen, a cross which was not made for my shoulders and which didn't concern me? Who decided to come rummaging around in my obscure existence, invade my gray anonymity, my meager tranquility, and bowl me like a little ball in a great game of skittles? God? Well, in that case, if He exists, if He really exists, let Him hide His face. Let Him put His two hands on His head, and let Him bow down. It may be, as Peiper used to teach us, that many men are unworthy of Him, but now I know that He, too, is unworthy of most of us, and that if the creature is capable of producing horror, it's solely because his Creator has slipped him the recipe for it.” - Philippe Claudel

64. “I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had.” - Mira Grant

65. “Given the choice, whether to rule a corrupt and failing empire; or to challenge the fates for another throw - a better throw - against one's destiny... what was a king to do? But does one even truly have a choice? One can only match, move by move, the machinations of fate... and thus defy the tyrannous stars.” - Amy Hennig

66. “I chose not to fight it. Eating them...is my revenge.” - J.H. Myn

67. “Our destinies depend on the choices we make. Be it wise or stupid.” - Paul Nat

68. “As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.” - Julio Cortazar

69. “I never needed the Society," she says, "to Match me." (-Lei)” - Ally Condie

70. “So is that it? Will I have to live the rest of my life like this? Not doing the right thing? Not saying the right words?""That's your choice. You can't change the past. Ah, but the future. . .you own the future." The Greenman smiled. "So, you tell me. . .what choice do you want to make now?” - Jonathan Maberry

71. “Besides, a life without freedom to choose is not worth having.” - Alasdair Gray

72. “But you know, even worrying about haircuts couldn't depress me. Because every time I started sinking low, I'd just remember about football. All this time I'd thought I wanted to be a trainer, when it turned out I wanted to be a player instead. I saw something I wanted to do and I decided to do it. The feeling of freedom this gave me—I can't even describe it. It was my decision. I chose it. I am not a cow.” - Catherine Gilbert Murdock

73. “Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.' Not the noblest, one never knows what that is. But the nobler, the best one can see when the choice is made.” - Robert K. Greenleaf

74. “But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing. . . How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?” - David Foster Wallace

75. “It's not that I can't live without you; it's that I don't want to. There's a difference. We all make choices in life and I choose you.My heart belongs to you. And I'm not asking for it back, even if you won't want it anymore. I'm just asking for a chance to have your again. I promise I'll be more careful with it this time.” - J. Sterling

76. “Patriotism is a thing difficult to put into words. It is neither precisely an emotion nor an opinion, nor a mandate, but a state of mind -- a reflection of our own personal sense of worth, and respect for our roots. Love of country plays a part, but it's not merely love. Neither is it pride, although pride too is one of the ingredients.Patriotism is a commitment to what is best inside us all. And it's a recognition of that wondrous common essence in our greater surroundings -- our school, team, city, state, our immediate society -- often ultimately delineated by our ethnic roots and borders... but not always.Indeed, these border lines are so fluid... And we do not pay allegiance as much as we resonate with a shared spirit.We all feel an undeniable bond with the land where we were born. And yet, if we leave it for another, we grow to feel a similar bond, often of a more complex nature. Both are forms of patriotism -- the first, involuntary, by birth, the second by choice.Neither is less worthy than the other.But one is earned.” - Vera Nazarian

77. “The question is not whether or not change and challenge are going to happen. They are. The question is, when they do happen, how are we going to choose to look at them, contextualize them, and navigate them?” - Jeffrey R. Anderson

78. “I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?” - Arthur Golden

79. “But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children.” - Caitlin Moran

80. “You lost your ability to choose the moment you started to use your eyes to see, and your heart to feel. Choice has become nothing but an illusion for you.” - Lionel Suggs

81. “Where does destiny end and choice begin?” - Eva Stachniak

82. “Empowerment is being aware that there is no one to blame for my choices and actions; that I have a personal choice and responsibility for my life.” - Steve Maraboli

83. “We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.” - Pema Chodron

84. “The best way to choose the wrong door, or never even open the door, is to let fear run the show. When you reflect on any big-ticket decision you have made on the basis of fear and anxiety, you can almost guarantee you made the wrong decision.” - Ramani Durvasula

85. “I‘m very aware that my personal life, my marriage, is the source of speculation and interest in the department and with the public. I can live with that. I’m also aware that my husband’s businesses, and his style of conducting his businesses, are also the source of speculation and interest. I have no particular problem with that. But I resent very much that my reputation and my husband’s character should be questioned this way. From the media, Commander, it’s to be expected, but not from my superior officer. Not from any member of the department I’ve served to the best of my ability. I want you to take note, Commander, that turning in my badge would be like cutting off my arm. But if it comes down to a choice between the job and my marriage, then I lose the arm.” - J.D. Robb

86. “Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.” - Ruth Padel

87. “Life happens, whether you're in it or not, but death doesn't give you a choice.” - Anthony Liccione

88. “Wait, Armand, he heard behind him but kept walking, ignoring the calls. Then he remembered what Emile had meant to him and still did. Did this one bad thing wipe everything else out?That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad.But not today. Gamache stopped.” - Louise Penny

89. “Membuat pilihan diantara dua pilihan yang berat bukan berarti harus meninggalkan salah” - Winna Efendi

90. “Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.” - Lauren Oliver

91. “God made the world like a knife. We have the choice to take it by the handle or the blade.” - C.J. Langenhoven

92. “Meg,” he whispered. “It wouldn’t be real love if there weren’t the possibility for another response to him. If we couldn’t choose not to love him, then our love would be empty. That’s why there’s evil in this world, because there’s free choice in this world. He allows the one to prove the other.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

93. “Life is a journey that gives you the liberty to draw your own map, and choose your own route.” - Dennis E. Adonis

94. “Self redemption is the first step to exoneration from guilt.” - Dennis E. Adonis

95. “One of the most foolish of all human philosophies, is to believe that we all have an unavoidable destiny.” - Dennis E. Adonis

96. “The answer can't be found in books - or be solved by bringing it to other people. Not unless you want to remain a child all your life. You've got to find the answer inside you - feel the right thing to do. Charlie, you've got to learn to trust yourself” - Daniel Keyes

97. “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

98. “Now he understood clearly that roads do divide, at the crossroad there is a choice, and blinding oneself to it is a form of choosing, too; it is the fool's way, the coward's way.” - Erik Christian Haugaard