62 Inspiring Choice Quotes

In the journey of life, every decision shapes our path and molds our character. The power of choice is a profound privilege that drives our actions and goals. To inspire and motivate your decision-making process, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 62 inspiring choice quotes. These quotes, from a range of thinkers, leaders, and visionaries, serve as a reminder of the impact our choices have. Dive in and let these words of wisdom guide you in making empowering decisions every day.

1. “He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.” - Sherman Alexie

2. “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” - William Jennings Bryan

3. “Would ye both eat your cake and have your cake?” - John Heywood

4. “The history of free men is never written by chance but by choice - their choice.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

5. “A craven can be as brave as any man, when there is nothing to fear. And we all do our duty, when there is no cost to it. How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man's life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose. (Maester Aemon)” - George R.R. Martin

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Freedom is not a license to act but a license to exercise free choices in any given situation.” - Vera Nazarian

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

10. “Let others lead small lives, but not you.. Let others argue over small things, but not you.. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you.. Let others leave their future in someone else's hands, but not you.” - Jim Rohn

11. “Do what you think is right. Don't let people make the decision of right or wrong for you.” - Steve Maraboli

12. “...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

13. “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

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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “Most of us cherish freedom, but when we actually get the opportunity to make our own way it can be terrifying.” - Tom Butler-Bowdon

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

19. “She was neither white nor black, Fyre nor Aquanite; she was a dame of the White King, and it was up to her, and her alone, to choose what path her life would take.” - Christine E. Schulze

20. “It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice.” - Andre Agassi

21. “I never fell. I don't care what they say. I'm still doing my job, as I see it.” - Neil Gaiman

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

23. “If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you."Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.” - Holly Black

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

25. “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

26. “All I'm saying is that you shouldn't stay with him for the wrong reasons, even if they are noble ones. No one owes it to someone else to be their girlfriend. It's a choice you remake every day.” - Aprilynne Pike

27. “I'm tired of being your best friend. I'm tired of being second best. I won't settle for that anymore. It's all or nothing, Schuyler. You have to decide. Him or me.- Oliver Hazzard-Perry” - Melissa de la Cruz

28. “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

29. “Amazing, Yetta thought. Back home I couldn't have chosen my own husband. And here I'm thinking about choosing presidents, governors, mayors, laws...” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

30. “I choose many voices to consider and reckon with, rather than just one to tolerate.” - T.F. Hodge

31. “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

32. “Contrary to what we've been told, life is simple. We complicate matters with our choices.” - Michelle Richardson

33. “It wasn’t that she necessarily wanted to “socialize” at the bonfire, but she wanted to broadcast to the general population that her antisocial behavior was a personal choice not a sentence to social leprosy.” - J.D. Stroube

34. “Spread the good and it will return to you. Spread the bad and it will return to you. Choice is yours what you want to receive.” - Ambreen Ali

35. “Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?” - H. Rider Haggard

36. “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

37. “He's in pain. I am, too. It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain we feel.” - Ally Condie

38. “...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

39. “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

40. “I wrote Unwind for lots of reasons, and it poses questions about alot of subjects. To state it briefly, I wanted to point out how when peopletake intractable positions on an issue, and stick to extreme sides,sometimes the result is a compromise that is worse than either extreme. Imeant it as a wake up call to society -- and to point out that sometimes theproblem IS that we take sides on an issue, when a different sort of approachis needed. It's also to pose questions about what it means to be alive.Where does life begin, where does it end -- and point out that there is nosingle answer to these questions. The problem is people who think there aresimple answers. People who see things as simple black-and-whiteright-and-wrong are the type of people who will end up with a world like theworld in Unwind.” - Neal Shusterman

41. “It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.” - Rene Dubos

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Elegir estar contigo no es una difícil decisión Jacqueline... Es fácil, increíblemente fácil.” - Tammara Webber

50. “Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly.” - Robert McKee

51. “Physical reality is one of the biggest horror movies of all, and you know how we love horror movies.” - Thaddeus Golas

52. “Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.” - Tom Hiddleston

53. “Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead...” - Og Mandino

54. “The choice is not in what you do. The choice is in the why.” - Emma Raveling

55. “He wished he could reassure his mother: a man wants many things in life, but when one of them is also the right thing, he would be a fool not to choose it.” - Jess Walter

56. “Don’t think so. We all make our choices, and those choices have consequences.” - Kami Garcia

57. “Each and every day begins with a choice, the first influencing the second, the third and so on . . .” - Evinda Lepins

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

59. “Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.” - Lauren Oliver

60. “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

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

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