Harvey Cox Quotes

Your one certainty in life, your power as a human being, is that you have a choice in every situation about what you do next and about how you take what has happened to you.

We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.

As human beings, we are responsible for our own lives. Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions. We can subordinate feelings to values.

It is our decisions not our conditions that determine our quality of life.

It’s up to you, not fate. True. But it was also up to Lily. That was the trickiest part.

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.

You and only you are responsible for your life choices and decisions.

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves.

This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.

Everything is something you decide to do, and there is nothing you have to do.

The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose.

Every man must decide for himself whether he shall master his world or be mastered by it.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice.

You decide the things that ultimately you do. You have choices in this world, and that's how I live.

I'm in control of the positions that I allow myself to be in.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

Everyone has to make their own decisions. I still believe in that. You just have to be able to accept the consequences without complaining.

Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

We are exactly where we have chosen to be.

Whatever can be done in this world will be done. The only question is whether it will be done by you or to you.

What, in the end, is freedom but the ability to choose?

When one has genuinely chosen a course for oneself it cannot be possible to hold another responsible for it.

For my life, I need to make my own choices.

From the moral as from the intellectual point of view, the child is born neither good nor bad but master of his destiny.