72 Inspiring Quotes On Decisions

Decisions shape the paths of our lives, influencing everything from our personal growth to our professional success. Whether they are small daily choices or life-altering determinations, the power of decision-making cannot be understated. With each turning point, there comes the opportunity to reflect, learn, and push forward. To inspire and guide you on this journey, we've curated a collection of the top 72 quotes on decisions. These insightful words from thinkers, leaders, and visionaries serve as a reminder of the strength and courage required to make bold choices and embrace their outcomes. Dive in and let these quotes inspire your own decision-making journey, providing wisdom and perspective as you carve your unique path forward.

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. “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

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

4. “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

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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “There must be a few times in life when you stand at a precipice of a decision. When you know there will forever be a Before and an After...I knew there would be no turning back if I designated this moment as my own Prime Meridian from which everything else would be measured.” - Justina Chen Headley

13. “If you always make the right decision, the safe decision,the one most people make, you will be the same as everyone else.” - Paul Arden

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

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

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

17. “The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

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

23. “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

24. “... 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

25. “Success is not determined by the outcome. The outcome is the result of having already decided that you are successful to begin with.” - T.F. Hodge

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

27. “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

28. “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

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. “Waiting hurts. Forgetting hurts. But not knowing which decision to take can sometimes be the most painful...” - José N. Harris

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. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

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

37. “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

38. “We try so hard because it is all we've ever known, I thought. We try to fit ourselves into this world so that we don't seem more different than different, an oddity in a sea of normality. We try because it is only instinct, but we obey because it is law.” - Nadège Richards

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

40. “Life is made up of chances to make choices, decisions of what you wish to do; the accumulated result of those choices is what you call your life.” - Steven Redhead

41. “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

42. “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

43. “Deciding to commit yourself to long term results rather than short term fixes is as important as any decision you'll make in your lifetime.” - Anthony Robbins

44. “I realize that the decision might be simple. It will require a great act of selflessness to choose Abnegation, or a great act of courage to choose Dauntless, and maybe just choosing one over the other will prove that I belong.” - Veronica Roth

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

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

57. “Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn” - Bertrand Russell

58. “It's like picking the place you're going to live for the next fifty years by using a wall map, a blindfold, and what you really, truly, deeply believe is your lucky dart.' Sullenly Judith said, `I don't believe I have a lucky dart,' and her mother cast an unhappy smile her way and said, `You will, though.” - Tom McNeal

59. “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

60. “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

61. “Many people fail in their career, business and relationship, and others get stuck because of their inability to make quality decisions.” - Nkem Mpamah

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

63. “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

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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

70. “If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is every completely right for any part, because part in a role is never real, so if you can't get someone who's perfectly right, it's more satisfying to get someone who's perfectly wrong. Then you know you've really got something.” - Andy Warhol

71. “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

72. “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