Decision quotes
4.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside decision — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"If there's anything you're not happy about-in your relationships, in your health, in your career-make a decision right now about how you're going to change it immediately."
"With every decision that anyone makes, the world changes. The decision that we give our consent to is the one that remains in our consciousness, but the one that we didn't make-that alternate world goes on in its own direction. So there's uncountable numbers of alternate "us-es.""
"With every choice you risk the life you would have had; with every decision, you lose it."
"I look at Starbucks, Howard Schultz has made many brilliant decisions, and one of the things that they did was they invented the third space. It's not work, it's not home. That's one of the engines of its spread. But at the same time he was doing that, he bet the farm to open more and more stores in any given town, and making it ubiquitous made it much easier to say to your friend, I'll meet you at Starbucks."
"F irst and foremost I am a drummer. After that, I'm other things... But I didn't play drums to make money. I played drums because I loved them... My soul is that of a drummer... It came to where I had to make a decision - I was going to be a drummer. Everything else goes now. I play drums. It was a conscious moment in my life when I said the rest of things were getting in the way. I didn't do it to be come rich and famous, I did it because it was the love of my life."
"In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king--but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true?"
"Happiness is the DNA of pleasure. My point is simply this: Pleasure comes from something on the outside. Happiness comes from within. It's a state you create by choice. It's a decision. It's an act of will."
"When I've heard all I need to make a decision, I don't take a vote. I make a decision."
"Sometimes we want to engage in a war for financial reasons, for strategic reasons, for moral reasons, for all sorts of reasons, and it's important when we're making that decision to remind ourselves of what happens to the people on the front lines when we start this process."
"As the leaders and decision-makers of this great state, it is our responsibility to strive for perfection."
"In my opinion, economists and sociologists are the people to whom we ought to turn more than we do for instruction in the grounds and foundations of all rational decisions."
"The court has had to take a hard look at our resources and make difficult decisions balancing competing demands for resources. While our current allocation of resources to the Twin Peaks Court may not be ideal, it is an appropriate allocation when all factors are considered. While I realize this will be disappointing news to you, I can assure you the matter was given serious thought before a decision was made."
"Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer."
"Good decisions don't make life easy, but they do make it easier."
"A question I would like to present to the world is: Where is the love? And what are we doing? Who's making the decisions that are putting us in the predicaments that we are in, with all of these people losing their lives around the world in so many different ways? I feel like a serious revolution needs to take place in order for human beings to evolve in a way where we can truly exist as a society."
"All models experience resistance during their modeling careers; the point is just to remain yourself and make meaningful and genuine decisions."
"I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions."
"I'm going to sleep well tonight knowing that I made the right decision."
"Somebody has to keep score and I decided I was going to do it. I'm a born score-keeper and I realize, like an umpire, that my decisions may cause distress."
"I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents."
