Martin Buber Quotes

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

When there's so much choice, it can get overwhelming and it's hard to make a choice.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

To light one candle to God and another to the Devil is the principle of wisdom.

No choice is the wrong choice as long as you make a choice. The only wrong choice is choosing not to make one.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

Decide: To succumb to one set of influences over another set.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

Before God closed in on me, I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair.

I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned recently is that when you don't know what to do, you should do nothing until you figure out what to do because a lot of times you feel like you are pressed against the wall, and you've got to make a decision. You never have to do anything. Don't know what to do? Do nothing.

Be decisive. A wrong decision is generally less disastrous than indecision.

To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do) — this is the perpetual illusion of morality.

Nobody makes me do anything I don't want to do. It's my decision. So the biggest devil is me. I'm either my best friend or my worst enemy.

I think the worst decision is usually no decision. If you make the wrong decision you can usually course-correct, but if you don't make it, you've already made it, and it's usually the bad one.

But now I wonder--what if everyone is pretty much the same and it's just a thousand small choices that add up to the person you are? No good or evil, no black and white, no inner demons or angels whispering the right answers in our ears like it's some cosmic SAT test. Just us, hour by hour, minute by minute, day by day,making the best choices we can. The thought is horrifying. If that's true, then there's no right choice. There's only choice.

We pass our life in deliberation, and we die upon it.

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. At that moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.

The man of decision cannot be stopped! The man of indecision cannot be started! Take your own choice.

Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered — now I have only one doubt left — which of the twain was God?

Making no decision is a decision. To do nothing. And doing nothing always brings you to nowhere.