Choice

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action? ~ Arthur Miller

Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. ~ Theodor Adorno

From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen. ~ Robert Nozick

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide. ~ Emily Bronte

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. ~ Khalil Gibran

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare. ~ Pierre Corneille

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself. ~ Walter Anderson

I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them. ~ Juliette Binoche

No matter how sad we might be, the universe is still planning our happiness. We can choose happiness in any moment we wish. ~ Marianne Williamson

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go. ~ Dr. Seuss

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. ~ Stephen Covey

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~ Anais Nin

Meditative Quotations for a Sunday Afternoon

A train of thought, in quotations...

"One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter." ~ James Earl Jones

"The thought manifests as the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into habit. And the habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care. And let it spring from love, born out of concern for all beings." ~ The Buddha

"Every beginning, after all, is nothing but a sequel, and the book of events is always open in the middle." ~ Wislawa Szymborska

"Once you have loved, You will always love. For what's in your mind may escape, but what's in your heart will remain forever. There is no instinct like that of the heart." ~ Lord Byron.

"Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted." ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts." ~ Charles Dickens

"In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me laugh." ~ W. H. Auden

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet." ~ Plato

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

"Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding." ~ Yehuda Amichai

"Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." ~ Rumi

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries." ~ Theodore Roethke