Quote collection
106 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible."
"Choice is more than picking 'x' over 'y.' It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow."
"What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. —Archibald MacLeish"
"We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world."
"In order to 'hold fast' to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice."
"Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing."
"Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow."
"The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day."
"The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing."
"I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, "Oh, okay, so it's just one choice." One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda."
"I pick what are my priorities and I limit those priorities to less than five in my life and really in those particular areas put in the energy to try to make good choices."
"We are often in society told to make decisions in one of two ways. We're either told "Use your gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you," or we're told to use reason - some very deliberative methodical process of pros and cons and really thinking it through."
"The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice."
"Life hands us a lot of hard choices, and other people can help us more than we might realize. We often think we should make important decisions using just our own internal resources. What are the pros and cons? What does my gut tell me? But often we have friends and family who know us in ways we don't know ourselves."
"The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else. Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered."
"Choosing is a creative process, one through which we construct our environment, our lives, ourselves."
"If we ask for more and more material for the construction, i.e. more and more choice, we're likely to end up with a lot of combinations that don't do much for us or are far more complex than they need to be."
"What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before."
"The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness-the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity."
"Consumers presented with six choices on an item were twice as likely to buy as consumers overwhelmed with 24 varieties of the same item."