Sermon quotes on Choices
Thomas Cranmer
What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.
Kevin DeYoung
The biggest deception of our digital age may be the lie that says we can be omni-competent, omni-informed, and omni-present. . . . We must choose our absence, our inability, and our ignorance—and choose wisely.
Crazy Busy
Charles Dickens
“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
A Christmas Carol
Elisabeth Elliot
Choices will continually be necessary and — let us not forget — possible. Obedience to God is always possible. It is a deadly error to fall into the notion that when feelings are extremely strong we can do nothing but act on them.”
Discipline: The Glad Surrender
Joe Fox (Tom Hanks)
“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat. So people who don’t know what they’re doing, or who on earth they are can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.”
You’ve Got Mail
Seamus Heaney
The way we are living,
timorous or bold,
will have been our life.
Stephen King
“It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
The Shawshank Redemption
C.S. Lewis
All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.
The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis
Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.
“And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
The Great Divorce
Nelson Mandela
May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.
Brennan Manning
I’ve decided if I had my life to live over again, I would not only climb more mountains, swim more rivers, and watch more sunsets. . . . I would not only go barefoot earlier in spring and stay out later in the fall; but I would devote not one more minute to monitoring my spiritual growth. . . . What would I actually do if I had it to do all over again? . . . I would simply do the next thing in love.
The Furious Longing of God
Thomas Merton
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
No Man is an Island, Shambhala Publications, 2005.
Iris Murdoch
I can only choose within the world that I can see.
The Sovereignty of Good
Iris Murdoch
At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over.
The Idea of Perfection
J.I. Packer
Wisdom is the power to see and the inclination to choose the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
Ann Patchett
Sometimes the circumstances at hand force us to be braver than we actually are, and so we knock on doors and ask for assistance. Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined.
What Now?
Eleanor Roosevelt
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words. It is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
Jean-Paul Sartre (For Contrast)
We are our choices.
Lee Strobel
If Jesus sets the divine standard for morality, I could now have an unwavering foundation for my choices and decisions, rather than basing them on the ever-shifting sands of expediency and self-centeredness.
Charles R. Swindoll
Attitude is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, money, circumstances, than failures and success, than what other people think, say, or do. It is more important than appearance, ability, or skill. It will make or break a business, a home, a friendship, an organization. The remarkable thing is I have a choice every day of what my attitude will be. I cannot change my past. I cannot change the actions of others. I cannot change the inevitable. The only thing I can change is attitude. Life is ten percent what happens to me and ninety percent how I react to it.
Amos Tversky
It’s hard to know how people select a course in life…the big choices we make are practically random. The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”
Quoted in Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Simone Weil
One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.
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