Octavian Paler Quotes

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

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

There's only X amount of time. You can do whatever you want with that time. It's your time.

Nothing that you do will ever feel good if you let people convince you that you have no choice.

Circumstances are beyond the control of man; but his conduct is in his own power.

The feeling of having no choice or no say is a fear of mine, partly because the idea of loosening oneself from the burden and responsibility of choice and consequence is so intoxicating.

I can control most things, but I don't seem to be able to control death.

The future is always changing. If we had no choices, there'd be no point in living.

Everyone has choices to make; no one has the right to take those choices away from us. Not even out of love.

Death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice.

Who gets to decide what you want?

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

No matter how frustrated you may feel, there is always a way out. In every situation that arises, we choose to be powerful or powerless. It may not always feel like it, but it is a choice. And there are consequences for these choices in terms of the results we get, and the subsequent increase or decrease in our power and influence. If we choose powerlessness, it is often because we doubt there is any other option.

Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.

True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.

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

Our power is in our ability to decide.

Things don't just happen, people make them happen

Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It's not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period.

Decision is the ultimate power. Decisions shape destiny.

We are all puppets in the hands of fate and seldom see the strings.

. . . the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.