Joseph Epstein Quotes

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

Your life~the way it looks today is a result of your choices...What will you choose today for your tomorrows?

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.

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

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.

I have the luck to choose what to do in my life.

The choice is yours: Do you want to exist, or do you want to live?

Accept that you are where you are and what you are because of your own choices and decisions.

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

We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren’t anything else.

Somewhere deep down we know that in the final analysis, we do decide things and that even our decisions to let someone else decide are really our decisions, however pusillanimous.

Everything you are comes from your choices.

All I know is that I have two choices – stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living.

I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose freewill.

To live is to choose.

Life is more a matter of choosing than knowing. He could never know the eventual destination of his path, but he could always choose in which direction to take each step.

There are two things that you have to do in life: You have to die, and you have to live until you die. The rest is up to you.

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.

Absolute freedom does not exist; what does exist is the freedom to choose anything you like and then commit yourself to that decision.

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

Whether or not we establish freedom rests with ourselves.

The biggest privilege I've had in my life is being able to make a choice. If you make a choice, it can't be a wrong choice because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.

I believe sometimes you have a choice in what inspiration you choose to follow and other times you really don't.