81 Decision-Making Quotes

In the intricate dance of life, the decisions we make often become pivotal moments that shape our future. Whether you're at a crossroads in your career, making personal choices, or pondering life-changing moves, the wisdom of others can light your path. To inspire and guide you, we’ve curated a compelling collection of 81 decision-making quotes. These words from leaders, thinkers, and visionaries offer profound insights and reflections on the art of making choices. Dive in and let these quotes empower you to navigate your journey with confidence and clarity.

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. “Once a decision was made, I didn't worry about it afterward...” - Harry S. Truman

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

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

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

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. “With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.” - Roman Payne

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. “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

13. “Not to decide is to decide.” - Harvey Cox

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.” - David Brooks

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

19. “There are no such things as curses; only people and their decisions” - Yvonne Wood

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

21. “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

22. “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

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

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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Everything, good or bad, was down to me.” - Dorothy Koomson

28. “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

29. “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

30. “The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate. ” - Ann Druyan

31. “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

32. “... 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

33. “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

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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “…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

40. “All you can do is make your decisions based on what you know now.” - Malinda Lo

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

42. “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.

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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “He felt that he was still groping in the dark; he had chosen his path but kept looking back, wondering whether he had misread the signs, whether he should not have taken the other way.” - J.K. Rowling

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

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

52. “You are honest enough by nature to be able to see and judge your own self clearly - and that is a great thing. Never lose that honesty, Bobby - always be honest with yourself, know your own motives for what they are, good or bad, make your own decisions firmly and justly - and you will be a fine, strong character, of some real use in this muddled world of ours!” - Enid Blyton

53. “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

54. “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

55. “-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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.” - Bono

60. “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

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

62. “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

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

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

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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “Circumstances don't determine who you are, or what you will be. Only you do that. You either decide, or you don't. Even the decision not to decide was still yours.” - Julie-Anne

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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “Decisions Determine the directions of your destiny” - Bobby Sullivan

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

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