Decision Making Quotes

“Waiting hurts. Forgetting hurts. But not knowing which decision to take can sometimes be the most painful...”
― José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love

“You can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”
― Michelle Obama

“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.

The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign- body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on- alters the moment you decide to do anything… decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.”
― Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

“So, what can't you take? Decide which of the two options is harder, and do the other. That way, no matter how hard your choice turns out to be, at least you can find comfort in knowing you're avoiding something even worse.”
― Josephine Angelini, Starcrossed

“Trust your instincts, and make judgements on what your heart tells you. The heart will not betray you.”
― David Gemmell, Fall of Kings

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
― Peter F. Drucker

“Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.”
― Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“Don't entrust your future on others' hands. Rather make decisions by yourself with the help of God's guidance. Hold your beliefs so tight and never let go of them!”
― Hark Herald Sarmiento

“The straight line, a respectable optical illusion which ruins many a man.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Let us not become victims of a crippling reasoning pattern. If we want to improve our decision-making and critical thinking, we must recognize our mental biases and be willing to overcome them. Let us avoid creating arguments to confirm pre-existing beliefs at all costs and invest in a ‘sunk cost fallacy.’ Better alight from a car out of control than drive it off the cliff. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

“We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board).”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“On an important decision one rarely has 100% of the information needed for a good decision no matter how much one spends or how long one waits. And, if one waits too long, he has a different problem and has to start all over. This is the terrible dilemma of the hesitant decision maker.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader

“At that moment, in the sunset on Watership Down, there was offered to General Woundwort the opportunity to show whether he was really the leader of vision and genius which he believed himself to be, or whether he was no more than a tyrant with the courage and cunning of a pirate. For one beat of his pulse the lame rabbit's idea shone clearly before him. He grasped it and realized what it meant. The next, he had pushed it away from him.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“It's not about making the right choice.
It's about making a choice and making it right.”
― J.R. Rim, Better to be able to love than to be loveable

“Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group. Given the force of the group's normative power to shape the opinions of the followers who conform without thinking things through, they are often taken at face value. The persistent minority forces the others to process the relevant information more mindfully. Research shows that the deciscions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“If you care about what people think about you, you will end up being their slave. Reject and pull your own rope.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Not making a decision is actually a decision. It's the decision to stay the same.”
― Lysa TerKeurst, The Best Yes: Making Wise Decisions in the Midst of Endless Demands

“In the space between yes and no, there is a lifetime. It’s the difference between the path you walk and one you leave behind; it’s the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; it’s the legroom for the lies you will tell yourself in the future.”
― Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart

“So. Tell me. What do you think? Which is better? To take action and perhaps make a fatal mistake - or to take no action and die slowly anyway?”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“Who can really say how decisions are made, how emotions change, how ideas arise? We talk about inspiration; about a bolt of lightnng from a clear sky, but perhaps everything is just as simple and just as infinitely complex as the processes that make a particular leaf fall at a particularmoment. That point has been reached, that's all. It has to happen, and it does happen.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Harbor

“The best people are always the worst. They drive everyone mad by being so good at second-guessing everything bad.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters.
What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.”
― Hal Herzog, Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

“Are you sure, Gray?'
He lifted his eyes. 'No . . . I'm not. I'm not sure of a damn thing.' He slipped his hands free of the monsignor's and peeled the battery off the phone, cutting the last ring in half. 'But that doesn't mean I won't act.”
― James Rollins, The Judas Strain

“In leadership, life and all things it’s far wiser to judge people by their deeds than their speech - their track record rather than their talk” – Rasheed Ogunlaru”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

“Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.”
― Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

“When a man showed up you didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at his face and he didn't want to look at yours, because it's painful to see somebody so clear that it's like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it may be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“Your choices are made in a moment, and yet their consequences transcend a lifetime.”
― MJ DeMarco

“Visionary decision-making happens at the intersection of intuition and logic.”
― Paul O'Brien, Great Decisions, Perfect Timing: Cultivating Intuitive Intelligence

“WHAT I'M TELLING YOU IS, IF YOU WANT TO DO THINGS YOUR OWN WAY, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO MAKE A DECISION - YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIND A LITTLE COURAGE.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany