Quotes About One Decision

“Well, there were, of course, people to call. A good fifty names in my telephone book, which I had acquired only a month ago. But there was no one I wanted to talk to, much less see. Maybe I was just depressed. In that case, long live depression! That hypothetical malady made it very easy for me to take the most important decision in my life.”

— Max Frei

“Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours
long hallways and unforeseen stairwells
eventually puts you in the place you are now.”

— Ann Patchett

“Sometimes one decision changes your life, and it doesnt have to be one you make yourself-or even know about.”

— Vicki Myron

“Obviously it takes eight brains to come to one decision in this crowd. Good thing they have one another.”

— Mari Mancusi

“Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children - who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world - would be seen as less selfish than those who unthinkingly have children. Yet the stigma remains.”

— Jessica Valenti

“One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Buker Hill, down in the middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.”

— John Fante

“The verbal tool of exploring mystery together is not confrontation or preaching but dialogue. We subject ourselves to the same questions we pose to others, and as we traverse them together, we may arrive at surprising conclusions we could never have reached when simply trying to defeat one another's logic. Our questions are open ended, granting the other person the freedom to respond or not to respond. The questions stick with us, even haunt us, long after we ask them, and we await insight together. The process is more important than an immediate decision.”

— Adam S. McHugh

“Marry the right person. This one decision will determine 90% of your happiness or misery.”

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“An increased power of reflection like an increased knowledge only adds to man's affliction, and above all it is certain that for the individual as for the generation no task is more difficult than to escape from the temptations of reflection, simply because they are so dialectical and the result of one clever discovery may give the whole question a new turn, because at any moment reflection is capable of explaining everything quite differently and allowing one some way of escape; because at the last moment of a reflective decision reflection is capable of changing everything
after one has made far greater exertions than are necessary to get a man of character into the midst of things.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

— Milan Kundera

“Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity”

— Thornton Wilder

“Do I want the present moment to be my friend or my enemy? ... Become friendly toward it, welcome it no matter in what disguise it comes, and soon you will see the results. Life becomes friendly toward you; people become helpful, circumstances cooperative ... But that one decision you have to make again and again and again - until it becomes natural to live in such a way.”

— Eckhart Tolle

“Your future can be changed by one decision. One good thing can offset a mountain of bad. But you need to choose.”

— Jennifer Probst

“The idea is that you don't only have one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go there are going to be upsides and downsides. You're dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one course in comparison to which all the others are crap ... There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn't want to have one bad and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”

— Lionel Shriver

“Just as one decision can change your destiny, so can one prayer. If you were to map out your spiritual history, you would find countless answers to prayer at key intersections along the way. Before you were even born, even named, many of you had parents and grandparents who prayed for you. At critical ages and stages, family and friends interceded on your behalf. And thousands of complete strangers have prayed for you in ways you aren't even aware of. The sum total of those prayers is your prayer genealogy.”

— Mark Batterson

“I am proud of you, Allison Sekemoto," he whispered as he drew back. "Whatever you decide, whatever path you choose to take, I hope that you will remain the same girl I met that night in the rain. The one decision for which I have no regrets.”

— Julie Kagawa

“In extraordinary circumstances and against the odds, Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Halifax, and that one decision changed the course of history.”

— Michael Dobbs

“I'll make the right decision, whichever one it is. I have to be 100 percent, not 95 or 99.”

— Karl Malone

“(So ... what are you thinking?)
About life. How strange it is, how one decision can affect so many people for all of time.”

— Karen Kingsbury

“I think my response to hearing that alarm would have been to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life, but over the past 21 years that instinct has been trained out of me and another set of responses has been trained in, represented by three words: warn, gather, work. "Working the problem" is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. We practice the "warn, gather, work" protocol for responding to fire alarms so frequently that it doesn't just become second nature; it actually supplants our natural instincts.”

— Chris Hadfield

“We're always just one decision away from disaster."
"When you lack wisdom,ask God who gives generously to all."James1:5”

— Rick Warren

“If one knows only what one is told, one does not know enough to be able to arrive at a well-balanced decision.”

— Leo Szilard

“Choose your life's mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness or misery.”

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“During the process that precedes the decision, no mention is made of what the answer might be. This is done so that people will not be forced to take sides; once they have taken sides, a decision would be a victory for one side and a defeat for the other. Thus the whole process is focused on finding out what the decision is really about, not what the decision should be. Its result is a meeting of the minds that there is (or is not) a need for a change in behavior.”

— Peter F. Drucker

“I am the only one who can decide what will happen to me," Kaitlyn went on very quietly. "No one else. Me. And I've already made my decision. I'm going back to that place and I'm going to try to stop them any way I can. Whether you give me the shard or not is your decision, but I'm going back anyway.”

— L.J. Smith

“It's fairness to say those who work hard, get up in the morning, cut their cloth - in other words 'we can only afford to have one or two children because we don't earn enough'. They pay their taxes and they want to know that the same kind of decision-making is taking place for those on benefits.”

— Iain Duncan Smith

“I would say of characters I've created, the one I've felt the most connected to emotionally was Adam Austin from 'The Prophet.' I think it was the connection to the idea that one decision you make innocently enough can have very serious, drastic consequences for someone else's life.”

— Michael Koryta

“One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.”

— Thomas Mallon

“DO ANYTHING! SOMETHING! Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with every breath you take.”

— Matthew Quick

“Because you start a revolution one decision at a time, with each breath you take.”

— Matthew Quick

“With one decision, Judge Sotomayor changed the entire dispute. Her ruling rescued the 1995 baseball season and forced the parties to resume real negotiations.”

— David Cone

“Another problem is that Paxos uses a symmetric peer-to-peer approach at its core (though it eventually suggests a weak form of leadership as a performance optimization). This makes sense in a simplified world where only one decision will be made, but few practical systems use this approach. If a series of decisions must be made, it is simpler and faster to first elect a leader, then have the leader coordinate the decisions.”

— Anonymous.

“I'll be judged on the body of work and not the popularity of any one decision.”

— Kamala Harris

“And what I saw happening is that women don't make one decision to leave the workforce. They makes lots of little decisions really far in advance that kind of inevitably lead them there.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

“A minimal level of sportsman ethics afield is mandated by written law. Beyond that, say, when an action is legal but ethically questionable, or when (as Aldo Leopold long ago pointed out) no one is watching, hunter ethics is an individual responsibility. As the existentialists would have it, we determine our own honor minute by minute, action by action, one decision at a time.”

— David Petersen

“There is only one decision you need to make: You are either working at your Freedom or you are accepting your bondage.”

— Robert Adams

“[B]ecause of all his previous attempts to integrate with the rest of society and what he had learned about himself through them - he wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.”

— Iain M. Banks

“If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United. I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Life is too short to make just one decision, music is too loud for just one station, love is too big for just one nation, and God is too big for just one religion!”

— Michael Franti

“Done right, a strategic intent is really one decision that makes 1,000 decisions.”

— Greg McKeown

“I made one decision in my life based on money and I swore I would never do it again.”

— Billy Beane

“Remember that a healthy body is built or destroyed one decision at a time. It's up to you.”

— Tosca Reno

“Up to a certain point anxiety is good, for it promotes action. Beyond that point we freeze any fixed attitudes or rush about without thinking deeply from one decision to another.”

— Jules Henry

“Would there not be the greatest reason to apprehend, that error in the first sentence would be the parent of error in the second sentence? That the strong bias of one decision would be apt to overrule the influence of any new lights, which might be brought to vary the complexion of another decision? Those, who know any thing of human nature, will not hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative.”

— Alexander Hamilton

“The women of my mother's generation had, in the main, only one decision to make about their lives: who they would marry. From that, so much else followed: where they would live, in what sort of conditions, whether they would be happy or sad or, so often, a bit of both. There were roles and there were rules.”

— Anna Quindlen

“The nation should move towards one target, one direction, one intention and one decision.”

— Narendra Modi

“The judgment that every voter is making of every one of us [running for presidency] who has the experience, who has the vision, who has the judgment to be commander in chief. That is the most important decision for the voters to make. That's a standard I'm held to. And it's a standard everyone else is held to.”

— Ted Cruz

“Actually, I can't take credit for any of my decisions. I noticed one day that all my decisions were making themselves, and always at the right time. I haven't had to make one decision since then. They are always made for me, and they come from the wisdom that is in us all. I trust that wisdom completely. That trust itself was a decision made for me as inquiry cleared my mind. No decision, no fear.”

— Byron Katie

“One decision can change your life forever.”

— Tony Robbins

“What's the most critical factor in any business decision you'll ever have to make? Basically, it boils down to this question: If this all crashes, will it bring the whole house tumbling down like a pack of cards? One business matra remains embedded in my brain - protect the downside.”

— Richard Branson