58 Decision-Making Quotes

In the intricate tapestry of life, decision-making stands as a pivotal thread, weaving our experiences, shaping our paths, and guiding our destinies. Whether faced with monumental choices or everyday dilemmas, the wisdom found in the words of those who have traversed similar crossroads can illuminate our journey. This curated collection of the top 58 decision-making quotes is designed to inspire, challenge, and empower you. Delve into the insights of great thinkers, leaders, and visionaries, and find the clarity and courage needed to make the decisions that define your life.

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. “Take risks! That is really what life is about. We must pursue our own happiness. Nobody has ever lived our lives; ther are no guidelines. Trust your instincts. Accept nothing but the best. But then also look for it carefully. Don't allow it to slip between your fingers. Sometimes, good things come to us in a such a quiet fashion. And nothing comes complete. It is what we make of whatever we encounter that determines the outcome. What we choose to see, what we choose to save. And what we choose to remember. Never forget that all the love in your life is there, inside you, always.” - Linda Olsson

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. “If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.” - James Surowiecki

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

8. “No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.” - James Surowiecki

9. “And it is clear to Evan, now: the difference between what is and what has been done; the present and the past. He sees that what he does and who he is isn't based on the past unless he wants it to be... No. That is the past, which has been seen differently through many different eyes and has become hazy and unclear, like a pond when stirred with a stick. Only the present moment is clear and free from prejudice.” - Garth Stein

10. “I don’t even have a choice. Rachel thought how that was pretty much true of everything now, that you got one choice at the beginning but if you didn’t choose right, and she hadn’t, things got narrow real quick. Like trying to wade a river, she thought. You take a wrong step and set your foot on a wobbly rock or in a drop-off and you’re swept away, and all you can do then is try to survive. (83)” - Ron Rash

11. “Do you want to be with Dave for the rest of your life?” Then he rips off a piece of paper and picks upthe smallest charcoal stick from my set. He writes something. He passes it over to me.It says:Time will tell.“And while you’re waiting,” he says, “don’t settle for anything less than what you really want.” - Susane Colasanti

12. “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

13. “She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.” - Colm Tóibín

14. “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

15. “There is nothing in the world so difficult as that task of making up one's mind. Who is there that has not longed that the power and privilege of selection among alternatives should be taken away from him in some important crisis of his life, and that his conduct should be arranged for him, either this way or that, by some divine power if it were possible, - by some patriarchal power in the absence of divinity, - or by chance, even, if nothing better than chance could be found to do it? But no one dares to cast the die, and to go honestly by the hazard. There must be the actual necessity of obeying the die, before even the die can be of any use.” - Anthony Trollope

16. “Be aware that how you feel has a direct impact on your thinking process. When we set standards for ourselves they seem objective, but standards and goal-setting are totally subjective and personal." From The Biology of Success.” - Robert Arnot

17. “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

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

19. “What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.” - Bodie Thoene

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

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

24. “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

25. “... but that's the beauty of boarding school. I make all my own decisions, small and medium, while the big ones are left up to the Prefect Academy - and as far as boys go, to the only expert I know - Suzanne Santry” - Adriana Trigiani

26. “My father taught me that you can you read a hundred books on wisdom and write a hundred books on wisdom, but unless you apply what you learned then its only words on a page. Life is not lived with intentions, but action.” - Shannon Alder

27. “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

28. “The decision is mine, and I choose happiness” - Malori Howell

29. “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

30. “Even if the decisions one made on a given day seemed crazy, it helped to think that all things happened for a mysterious reason.” - Lorna Jane Cook

31. “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.

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk - it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.” - Criss Jami

37. “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

38. “The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.” - Jodi Picoult

39. “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

40. “I don't regret any of the decisions I've made in my life because with every choice I make, I learn something new.” - Siva Kaneswaren

41. “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

42. “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

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

44. “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

45. “You couldn't changed history. But you could get it right to start with. Do something differently the FIRST time around.This whole business with seeking Slytherin's secrets... seemed an awful lot like the sort of thing where, years later, you would look back and say, 'And THAT was where it all started to go wrong.'And he would wish desperately for the ability to fall back through time and make a different choice. Wish granted. Now what?” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

46. “And so back to Cassie: who was she? Part of the deception; just a friend or something else…perhaps it was time to find out.” - Melanie Cusick-Jones

47. “...When a choice will make a real difference in our lives—obvious or not—and when we are living in tune with the Spirit and seeking his guidance, we can be sure we will receive the guidance we need to attain our goal.” - Dallin H. Oaks

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

49. “This is your time. Make it count by dedicating your time to your Heavenly Father.” - Kristen Oaks

50. “...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

51. “Some decisions in life naturally lead to an unhappy ending, leaving you sinking by degrees in a lake of quicksand.  And, unless someone reaches to pull you out, chances are you will drown in the consequences.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “The only good thing about having your back to the wall is that it makes it really easy to choose which way you're going to go.” - Jim Butcher

56. “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

57. “A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It's scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you're going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you're the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too.” - Suzanne Palmieri

58. “Even not choosing is a choice.” - Denise Grover Swank