107 Decision-Making Quotes

In the intricate web of daily life, decision-making stands as one of the most pivotal skills we harness. Whether navigating personal crossroads or professional dilemmas, the choices we make can significantly shape our futures. To inspire and guide you through your decision-making journey, we’ve curated a collection of the top 107 decision-making quotes. These pearls of wisdom offer diverse perspectives from leaders, thinkers, and visionaries, shedding light on the art and science of making choices. Dive in and discover insights that resonate, encourage, and perhaps even transform the way you approach decisions.

1. “I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!” - Mark Twain

2. “When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.” - Horace Walpole

3. “It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires a great deal of strength to decide what to do.” - Elbert Hubbard

4. “Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.” - Jared Diamond

5. “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

6. “The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;” - W.H. Auden

7. “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.” - Malcolm Gladwell

8. “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.” - James Surowiecki

9. “Don't ascribe to evil what can be attributed to well-intentioned stupidity.” - James A. Owen

10. “Can't it be stopped?" said Lina. She shifted around under her blanket, trying to find a place to sit where rocks weren't digging into her.Maybe it can be stopped at the beginning," Maddy said. "If someone sees what's happening and is brave enough to reverse the direction."Reverse the direction?"Yes, turn it around."How would you do that?"You'd do something good," said Maddy. "Or at least you'd keep yourself from doing something bad."But how could you?" said Lina. "When people have been mean to you, why would you want to be good to them?"You wouldn't want to," said Maddy. "That's what makes it hard. you do it anyway. Being good is hard. Much harder than being bad.” - Jeanne DuPrau

11. “Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.” - Viktor E. Frankl

12. “Jump or stay in the boat.” - Margaret Stohl

13. “Every day you face two important decisions: what effect you want your speech and actions to have on the world around you, and what impressions and vibrations you want to be receptive to.” - Kalashatra Govinda

14. “The native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought; and enterprises of great pitch and moment, With this regard, their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.” - William Shakespeare

15. “The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.” - Michael Pollan

16. “Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.” - C.S. Lewis

17. “Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.” - Megan Whalen Turner

18. “But time has a way of stealthily deciding a person’s mind without her conscious knowledge, and as she studied and procrastinated, Poison found one day that she had come to know her choice.” - Chris Wooding

19. “The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led.” - Lisa Wingate

20. “Havin to make all the rules, all the time, wasn’t never my idea of a party.” - Todd Johnson

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

22. “I wish I could turn back time, but I can't. I made a stupid decision because I thought I was invincible, and I'll pay for it the rest of my life.” - Simone Elkeles

23. “you must be careful never to allow doubt to paralyze you. always take the decisions you need to take, even if you're not sure you're doing the right thing. You'll never go wrong if, when you make a decision, you keep in mind an old German proverb: 'The devil is in the detail.' Remember that proverb and you'll always be able to turn a wrong decision into a right one.” - Paulo Coelho

24. “There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.” - Louis Menand

25. “The right thing was confusing, and difficult, and sometimes Jason wondered if it was in fact a nonexistent ideal, like heaven or the American dream. There was no right thing. You did what you did for whatever reasons occurred to you at the time, depending on whichever emotion was running thickest in your blood. Your desire and fear and adrenaline and longing. You made your choice and came up with the reasons later.” - Thomas Mullen

26. “Every moment is a moment of decision, and every moment turns us inexorably in the direction of the rest of our lives.” - Mary Balogh

27. “It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” - Roy Disney

28. “Question.""Yes," Candace asked expectantly, eyes fixed on the dark street ahead."Have you ever had to chose sides between a friend and a boyfriend?"Candace nodded."Which side are you suppose to pick?""The right one.""What if they're both right?""They're not.""But they are," Melody insisted. "That's the problem.""No." Candace slowly rolled past a police cruiser. "They both think they're right. But who do you think is right? Which side represents the thing you think is worth fighting for?"Melody glanced out the window as though she was expecting the answer to be revealed on a neighbor's lawn. Every house except hers had the lights turned off. "I dunno.""You do," Candace insisted. "You just don't have the courage to be honest with yourself. Because then you'd have to do the thing you don't want to do, and you hate doing anything that's hard. Which is why you gave up singing and why you have no life and why you've always been a -""Um okay! Can we get back to the part where you were sounding like Oprah?""I'm just saying, Melly, what would you do if you weren't afraid? That's your answer. That's your side." She turned into the circular driveway and put the SUV in PARK. "And if you don't choose it, you're lying to yourself and everyone around you." She opened the door and grabbed her purse. "Oprah out!"The door slammed behind her.” - Lisi Harrison

29. “Tiene más filo una decisión que una gillette en la espalda.” - Fito Paez

30. “Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.” - E.E. Cummings

31. “He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.” - Patrick White

32. “Big decisions in my life have always come easy and are made without hesitation. It is easier for me to make a life-changing decision than to decide what to get for dessert.” - Tony Hawk

33. “We suddenly feel fearful and apprehensive, naked in our perishable flesh, and for just a moment we wish we could go back to being stone—crumbling in death rather than rotting, trapped inside an immobile prison of stone rather than reduced to immaterial souls like those that now rattled within our skulls. The moment passes. There is no point in regretting irreversible decisions—one has to live with them, and we try.” - Ekaterina Sedia

34. “I was only able to get over my past when I decided I was going to! As I’ve discovered, that’s how everything starts. I decided to get out of bed this morning. I decided to get ready for work (D’oh! Another early morning). Everything I did today was because I made a decision. Although we can’t set ourselves free, getting up and making a decision to move on from our past is a step in the right direction. We can’t do God’s part, and He won’t do our part. He can’t make that decision for you, because only you can. But once you have made that decision, He can help you with the rest.” - Corallie Buchanan

35. “That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been playful, she had been playful in the face of that knowledge, as defiant as before the rabid thing. Sometimes you looked the thing in the eye and it turned away. Sometimes it didn't.” - David Wroblewski

36. “The smallest decisions made had such profound repercussions. One ten-minute wait could save a life… Or end it… One wrong turn down the right street or one seemingly unimportant conversation, and everything was changed. It wasn’t right that each lifetime was defined, ruined, ended, and made by such seemingly innocuous details. A major life-threatening event should come with a flashing warning sign that either said ABANDON ALL HOPE or SAFETY AHEAD. It was the cruelest joke of all that no one could see the most vicious curves until they were over the edge, falling into the abyss below.” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

37. “This is how sudden things happened that haunted forever.” - Daniel Woodrell

38. “Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.” - Anne Enright

39. “Don't decide yet," Hephaestus advised. "Wait until daybreak. Daybreak is a good time for decisions.” - Rick Riordan

40. “Please do make your decisions in life and feel confident that they are right.However, if fate is involved, feel just as confident even if they aren’t.” - C. Elizabeth

41. “He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.” - Shannon L. Alder

42. “But he was able to understand one thing: making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.” - Paulo Coelho

43. “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” - Sylvia Plath

44. “Don't entrust your future on others' hands. Rather make decisions by yourself with the help of God's guidance. Hold your beliefs so tight and never let go of them!” - Hark Herald Sarmiento

45. “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

46. “…There are times when something is asked of us, and we find we must do it. There is no calculation involved, no measure of the necessity of the thing itself, the action that must be performed. There is simply an acknowledgment that we will do the thing in question, and then the thing is done, often at considerable personal cost. ""What goes into these decisions? What tiny factors, invisible, in the jutting edges of personality and circumstance, contribute to this inevitability?” - Jesse Ball

47. “Cassie: What would it cost me if I kissed him? What would it cost me if I didn’t?” - Melanie Cusick-Jones

48. “When you walk into a chocolate store, suddenly the most difficult decision you will ever have to make in your life, is which chocolates to pick! It is pure torture! Especially when you are in Belgium surrounded by Belgian chocolates!” - C. JoyBell C.

49. “In life, you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.” - Mark Haddon

50. “The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.” - G.K. Chesterton

51. “When you don't change, history repeats itself. Then you have to decide if changing is for the best, or you keep seeing repeats because you're doing something right.” - Rebecca McKinsey

52. “It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.” - Shauna Niequist

53. “Someone once said anyone can be great under rosy circumstances, but the true test of character is measured by how well a person makes decisions during difficult times.” - Jack Gantos

54. “Whatever you decide, don't let it be because you don't think you have a choice.” - Hannah Harrington

55. “No single decision you ever made has led in a straight line to where you find yourself now. You peeked down some roads and took a few steps before turning back. You followed some roads that came to a dead end and others that got lost at too many intersections. Ultimately, all roads are connected to all other roads.” - Deepak Chopra

56. “That's the thing about freewill: Every decision we make is a choice against something as much as it is for something else.” - Rebecca Serle

57. “Part of making a good decision is just making a decision. You can't always sit and weigh the pros and cons. There just isn't time for that. Making a good decision means sticking with your choice and dealing with what comes with it. Being able to deal with the consequences—that's making a good decision.” - J.X. Burros

58. “Every time he tried to reconstruct the internal arguments that had led to his decision, they sounded feebler to him.” - J.K. Rowling

59. “Jesus told us to make disciples, not decisions.” - John Pereira

60. “People make decisions, and maybe you don't always agree, but those choices are still their own.” - Brenna Yovanoff

61. “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

62. “I know I should just leave. Just go. Because there's a point where a mistake turns into a big mistake, and I should probably come to my senses before I get there.” - David Levithan

63. “-Elves never make any major decision until they have thought the matter over for at least a year or two, gone round to all their friends and relatives and discussed the problem, done research, read tomes, consulted the sages.-And what happens then?- By then they've usually forgotten what it was they meant to do in the first place.” - Margaret Weis

64. “Who can really say how decisions are made, how emotions change, how ideas arise? We talk about inspiration; about a bolt of lightnng from a clear sky, but perhaps everything is just as simple and just as infinitely complex as the processes that make a particular leaf fall at a particularmoment. That point has been reached, that's all. It has to happen, and it does happen.” - John Ajvide Lindqvist

65. “For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured.“For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?”“You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.” - Frank Herbert

66. “Do nothing, and nothing happens. Life is about decisions. You either make them or they're made for you, but you can't avoid them.” - Mhairi McFarlane

67. “When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties” - Virginia Woolf

68. “Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.” - Robert McKee

69. “On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.” - Robert K. Greenleaf

70. “They say faith is taking the first step when you can’t see the whole staircase. Actually, wisdom is seeing the elevator behind it that would have taken you to the top floor.” - Shannon L. Alder

71. “Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.” - Lois McMaster Bujold

72. “Don’t think about it. Don’t think about what could have been. It’s too unbearable.” - Sophie Kinsella

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

74. “I blame Doctor Who. Mr Spock. The Scooby Gang: both the ones in the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes. I've spent my life with stories of people who don't walk away, who go back for their friends, who make that last stand. I've been brainwashed by Samwise Gamgee.” - Andrea K. Höst

75. “Hindsight is always easier than the dreadful moment of decision.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

76. “There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.” - Alain De Botton

77. “Possible is more a matter of attitude, A matter of decision, to choose Among the impossible possibilities, When one sound opportunity Becomes a possible solution.” - Dejan Stojanovic

78. “Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information you had at that time, there's no need to fret about it. If it fails, you'll know what to do next time.” - Bo Schembechler

79. “I had made a decision, although I hardly knew it yet. It's often that way with decisions, they're made in some hidden part of us and the awareness secretes itself slowly into that conscious part of us that imagines it decides.” - Neil Jordan

80. “I prefer to suffer than repent because I stand by my decision and capable enough top pay for it Or reap the beauty later.” - Ravindra Shukla

81. “My bad luck got tangled up with my bad decisions, and I'm paying for it.” - Patrick Rothfuss

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

83. “Don't overthink things. Sometimes you can convince your head not to listen to your heart. Those are the decisions you regret for the rest of your life." Faith Barnett From Texas Tangle” - Leah Braemel

84. “Thirteen years of friendship had bonded us together more thoroughly than if we had been born of the same mother. Even at this late stage, I was unwilling to let him go.” - Melika Dannese Lux

85. “Every decision has a consequence.” - Damon Darrell

86. “Our decisions define our lives. We are the people we choose to be in the ways that most matter. Choose wisely. You will live with the choices you make.The choices you make define your character. And your character defines how you feel about yourself. That image of you is projected in hundreds of ways to others.” - Vicki Hinze

87. “...each person is required to ask, 'what is my authority?' - on what do you base your decisions? if it's yourself, then you are without excuse...” - John Geddes

88. “Sometimes it's a good idea to think about what you want from a situation, and try to get it, rather than just blurt out the first thing that comes into your head.” - E. Lockhart

89. “The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny.” - Jim Butcher

90. “Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.” - Shannon L. Alder

91. “I know when something is too important to be decided by logic.” - Lisa Kleypas

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

93. “Opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth. Everyone has a flock of opinions ready to be wished upon anyone who will accept them. If you are influenced by "opinions" when you reach DECISIONS, you will not succeed in any undertaking.” - Napoleon Hill

94. “You can't make the right decision, but you can always make the dicision right.” - Thomas Murdock

95. “Sometimes I think if we didn’t have these problems the whole world would stop spinning on her axis, we’d all stop spinning on our axises, axes, or whatever you want to call them, and then we’d have to settle into the nasty business of finding a way to be happy.” - Daniel Clausen

96. “Every brush stroke on the canvas, every dab of color introduced, the fine textures impressed in the paint—this accumulation of many small acts combines to shape a final work of art.  And so it is with life; each step, each deed, each brief choice builds gradually, day by day, to shape both character and destiny.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

97. “You will find that people will always have opinions about your decisions. Don’t take it personally, it’s simply because they're not courageous enough to take action in their own lives. Be a leader in your life and pay no mind to those who lack the courage to do the same in theirs.” - Steve Maraboli

98. “Cut away the nonsense, the drama, the regret, the scars of the past, and make a decision to no longer let them govern your happiness and freedom.” - Steve Maraboli

99. “Patience is the antidote to the restless poison of the Ego. Without it we all become ego-maniacal bulls in china shops, destroying our future happiness as we blindly rush in where angels fear to tread. In these out-of-control moments, we bulldoze through the best possible outcomes for our lives, only to return to the scene of the crime later to cry over spilt milk.” - Anthon St. Maarten

100. “It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

101. “I wouldn't want to live that life. I choose the pain. I chose the pain.” - Suzanne Palmieri

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

103. “We are the sum total of the decisions we have made.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

104. “Better to be happy with the cod fish in your plate now, than to linger for the taste of a tuna that is still swimming in the sea.” - Dennis E. Adonis

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

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

107. “I had reclusive tendencies for a reason, I couldn’t be trusted to live in the world and make decisions on my own.” - Penny Reid