101 Choice Quotes To Inspire

In a world bustling with noise and distractions, words have the unique power to cut through the chaos and touch our deepest emotions. Whether you're searching for motivation, wisdom, or a spark of creativity, the right quote can unlock a fresh perspective and kindle the drive within. Our curated collection of the top 101 choice quotes is crafted to inspire, offering a treasury of insights from some of history's most profound thinkers and doers. Dive in and discover gems that resonate with your journey, prompting reflection and igniting your path forward.

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. “But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.” - John Steinbeck

3. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” - Kurt Vonnegut

4. “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.” - Neil Peart

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

6. “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.” - Anthony Burgess

7. “Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.” - Whoopi Goldberg

8. “It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.” - Rumer Godden

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

10. “Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live, and she was always thinking that, in the future, she might regret the choices she made now. “I’m afraid of committing myself,” she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic disappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pan, loss, and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes not to see the bad things in life.” - Paulo Coelho

11. “Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.” - John Steinbeck

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. “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.” - Jacques Monod

14. “We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

15. “What happens if your choice is misguided?' I ask, softly.Miss Moore takes a pear from the bowl and offers us the grapes to devour. 'You must try to correct it.''But what if it’s too late? What if you can’t?'There's a sad sympathy in Miss Moore's catlike eyes as she regards my painting again. She paints the thinnest sliver of shadow along the bottom of the apple, bringing it fully to life.'Then you must find a way to live with it.” - Libba Bray

16. “With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of.” - Alex Shakar

17. “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

18. “You will always define events in a manner which will validate your agreement with reality.” - Steve Maraboli

19. “Although goals are important, having a plan of action is vital to the success of those goals. Having a goal with no plan of action is like wanting to travel to a new destination without having a map.” - Steve Maraboli

20. “You have been blessed with immeasurable power to make positive changes in your life.” - Steve Maraboli

21. “Never compromise your values.” - Steve Maraboli

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

23. “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

24. “Our minds are information vacuums. Either we fill them with thoughts of our choosing or someone else will.” - Ray A. Davis

25. “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

26. “There is always a choice." "You mean I could choose certain death?" "A choice nevertheless, or perhaps an alternative. You see I believe in freedom. Not many people do, although they will of course protest otherwise. And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.” - Terry Pratchett

27. “There are things you do sometimes, actions that you take by obeying sudden impulses, without stopping for even a fraction of a second to think, and then you spend the rest of your life either lamenting it or thanking yourself for it. They are rare, unique, and perfect moments.” - Irene González Frei

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

29. “One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

30. “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.” - Robert A. Heinlein

31. “ChoiceI needed it like I needed air.Bit no one could hear me. No one could listen. No words. No sound.No voice.I couldn't even dream myself away.Choices were made.None of them mine.At first I wondered if it was hell.And then I knew it was.” - Mary E. Pearson

32. “He often felt that too many people lived their lives acting and pretending,wearing masks and losing themselves in the process.” - Nicholas Sparks

33. “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

34. “You won't understand this now, Saira. Later, perhaps. When you are older. When you learn that life is not only about the choices you make. That some of them will be made for you.” - Nafisa Haji

35. “If it feels like you're choosing between the lesser of two evils, don't. There is always a higher choice.” - Michael Neill

36. “Leaders live by choice, not by accident.” - Mark Gorman

37. “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

38. “Believe it or not, the notions of free will and destiny are not mutually exclusive.Predestination is the universal framework of limits (based on natural physical laws) placed upon us.Free will is our infinite ability to make choices within that framework.Because the universal scale is so great—and most of it constitutes an undiscovered frontier—our choices are only limited by our knowledge, our abilities, and our imagination.To put it simply, the world is such a huge playground sandbox that we will never run out of sand or reach the faraway safety fence of destiny.So go out there and play!” - Vera Nazarian

39. “In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

41. “There are many differing viewpoints on nature versus nurture, and there are those who believe that bad behavior can be excused and understood if a person doesn't know better. The theory that someone who has been abused as a child will go on to abuse their own children, and so on, because they don't know differently is widely held. But children know. We all know.Learned behavior. When a child is abused, he or she knows, even as it is happening, that it is wrong. I knew. I was abused. When a child is treated unfairly in any way, he or she knows that it is wrong. I knew. I was treated unfairly. And when a child is treated with love and affection, he or she knows that it is right. I knew. I saw how other kids were treated with love and affection by their parents. I knew. My soul cried out to me and told me so. We all know. We all know right from wrong. Our souls cry out to us and tell us so. And we decide, we make our choices, and we are responsible for those choices. We, no one else but we, decide.Anger, hurt, pain, humiliation, fear, dread, confusion-all these emotions we choose. De we hold on to our anger, our pain and humiliation, and hit back, or do we strive to understand that we can do better?” - Rosemary Altea

42. “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

43. “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

44. “This path was not that of my conscious choosing. But after persistent subconscious confrontation, I have finally embraced what is, 'souly' for me...and I am thankful, when called upon, to be able to share and give to those who seek their own way of the path.” - T.F. Hodge

45. “There are two paths of which one may choose in the walk of life; one we are born with, and the one we consciously blaze. One is naturally true, while the other is a perceptive illusion. Choose wisely at each fork in the road.” - T.F. Hodge

46. “Maybe I should be still; accept my fate. But I have tasted freedom, known love – I have had choice and learnt what it is to have a human heart, not just a compliant one.” - Dianna Hardy

47. “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

48. “I was here on earth because I chose to be.” - John Cheever

49. “Choose being kind over being right and you'll be right every time.” - Richard Carlson

50. “[F]rom my years of understanding ... I happily chose this kind of life in which I yet live [i.e., unmarried], which I assure you for my own part hath hitherto best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God. From the which if either ambition of high estate offered to me in marriage by the pleasure and appointment of my prince ... or if the eschewing of the danger of my enemies or the avoiding of the peril of death ... could have drawn or dissuaded me from this kind of life, I had not now remained in this estate wherein you see me. But so constant have I always continued in this determination ... yet is it most true that at this day I stand free from any other meaning that either I have had in times past or have at this present.” - Elizabeth I

51. “...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

52. “So long as we are brave enough to accept the consequences of our actions, no one can take away our freedom of choice.” - Mike Norton

53. “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

54. “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

55. “No: I shall not marry Samuel Fawthrop Wynne.""I ask why? I must have a reason. In all respects he is more than worthy of you."She stood on the hearth; she was pale as the white marble slab and cornice behind her; her eyes flashed large, dilated, unsmiling."And I ask in what sense that young man is worthy of me?” - Charlotte Brontë

56. “I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand -- they only. Know this at last.” - Charlotte Brontë

57. “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

58. “There is so much freedom in not having to choose.” - Megan Hart

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

60. “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)

61. “You have two choices: You can make a living, or you can design a life.” - Jim Rohn

62. “All love on this earth involves choice. When, for example, a young man expresses his love to a young woman and asks her to become his wife, he is not just making an affirmation of love; he is also negating his love for anyone else. In that one act by which he chooses her, he rejects all that is not her. There is no other real way in which to prove we love a thing than by choosing it in preference to something else. Word and signs of love may be, and often are, expressions of egotism or passion; but deeds are proofs of love. We can prove we love our Lord only by choosing Him in preference to anything else.” - Fulton J. Sheen

63. “Heresy," by the way, simply means "choice." It came to mean "thoughtcrime," implying it was blasphemy to presume to choose your own belief instead of swallowing what the bishops spoonfed you.” - Robert M. Price

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

65. “You can never make the same mistake twice because the second time you make it, it's not a mistake, it's a choice.” - Steven Denn

66. “If we actually thought about every decision we made, we'd be paralyzed ... You have to decide which decisions you're actually going to make, and then you have to let the rest of them go.” - David Levithan

67. “A person's looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we've been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That's the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.” - Tom Robbins

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. “Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.” - Julio Cortazar

70. “It’s up to you. Everyone should get to choose their own way, and that’s all I mean by yelling. But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That’s how it generally goes in my country.” But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again. Remembering aches, like when I remember my father. It’d be so much easier to never wonder about him. I’m sure he remembers my face, but it’s hard to remember his, when he’s been gone so long! Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.” - Catherynne M. Valente

71. “All choices are illusions, or if they are not illusions their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment.” - Kevin Powers

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

73. “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

74. “There's always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck, but that doesn't mean there isn't a choice.” - Jim Butcher

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “This was not a man who wanted to give up his mate. This was a man trying to do the honorable thing—and give her a choice, no matter hiw much it cost him.” - Patricia Briggs

80. “Choice was dangerous: you had to forgo all other possibilities when you chose.” - J.K. Rowling

81. “If you choose to walk through the fire, why do you complain it's hot?” - Anthony Liccione

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

83. “We don't choose our wildest dreams. They choose us.” - Tama Kieves

84. “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

85. “I knew they would kill me when they found out, but…” He struggled for words, releasing a sharp breath. “I think I realized that I would rather die because I betrayed them, than live because I betrayed you.” - Marissa Meyer

86. “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

87. “It’s so strange how one choice can derail so many lives. It was so huge to me, I expected her answer to change everything, but it didn’t. I guess that’s life, right? You never really know what’s waiting for you. You never really know what’s going to happen or why. You just have to be able to deal with it. Big or small.” - Nyrae Dawn

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

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

90. “I wonder if it hurts to live,And if they have to try,And whether, could they choose between,They would not rather die.” - Emily Dickinson

91. “To be or not to be, that is the choice” - Daniel Lee Edstrom

92. “It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.” - Andrea Dworkin

93. “Choices are powerful things. In fact, they’re more powerful than most things.” - Amy Neftzger

94. “There is no feeling that is comparable to that of being truly lost. I don’t mean lost in the woods, or desert, but lost in the way that only can happen internally. Lost to the deepest,blackest pit of your soul, clinging to ghosts of past times, when you thought you knew who andwhat you were. When this happens, you have two choices; you can give in to your darkest inclinations,and accept what you are, or you can fight, knowing that it is a losing battle, that the good halfof your soul is strong, but can never erase the bad part.” - H.D. Gordon

95. “I BELIEVE EVERYONE IS SPECIAL . . . BUT SOME PEOPLE THINK . . . . IT'S JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING NO-ONE IS” - ASHISH RANJAN

96. “So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...” - Ursula K. Le Guin

97. “We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.” - Lauren Oliver

98. “Remember, I might be the wind, but you control the kite.” - Kathy Reichs

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

100. “HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray.” - Sheri S. Tepper

101. “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