Willem de Kooning Quotes

Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.

Even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

I want to walk through life instead of being dragged through it.

You shape your own destiny.

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

Control your own destiny! Control your own destiny!

You are not here to try to get the world to be just as you want it. You are here to create the world around you that you choose.

I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.

There’s a redemptive power that making a choice has rather than feeling like you’re an effect to all the things that are happening. Make a choice. Just decide what it’s gonna be, who you’re gonna be, how you are going to do it. Just decide. And from that point, the universe will get out of your way.

You want to be in the driver’s seat of your own life because if you are not, life will drive you.

There are really only two ways to approach life - as victim or as gallant fighter - and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don't decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you.

I need not wait for I have the power to choose my own destiny.

You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you've chosen to be and do about what has happened.

No matter what the situation, remind yourself "I have a choice."

My mother implanted in me as a young girl...you can either be an actor in your own life, or a reactor in somebody else's.

To [man] it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.

I'll succeed,' Hazel promised. 'And Hecate? I'm not choosing one of your paths. I'm making my own.

You don't have to buy from anyone. You don't have to work at any particular job. You don't have to participate in any given relationship. You can choose.

How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.

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

We are not animals. We are not a product of what has happened to us in our past. We have the power of choice.

You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.

I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so different - but I am saying that there's no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.

But I always had the ability to say no. That's how I called my own shots.