Indecision Quotes - Page 5

• Most procrastination is largely indecision. Someone has said that "hell is just truth seen too late."

  Sterling W Sill

  Procrastination, Too Late, Hell

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• A lobster, when left high and dry among the rock, does not have the sense enough to work his way back to the sea, but waits for the sea to come to him. If it does not come, he remains where he is and dies, although the slightest effort would enable him to reach the waves, which are perhaps within a yard of him. The world is full of human lobsters; people stranded on the rocks of indecision and procrastination, who, instead of putting forth their own energies, are waiting for some grand billow of good fortune to set them afloat.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Procrastination, Rocks, Sea

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• Damned indecision and cursed pride.

  Michael Jackson

  Relationship, Pride, Cursed

  Song: She Is Out Of My Life

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• In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

  Amor Towles

  Decision, Vision, Twenties

  Amor Towles (2011). “Rules of Civility: A Novel”, p.323, Penguin

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• Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.

  Dan Simmons

  Book, Men, Self

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• In the '90s, when I started, it was still a rough-and-tumble, physical league. You take the hook and holding and a little bit of the physicality out of the game, and the speed ratcheted up two-fold. Now you have a split second to make a hit, or decide to pull up. When there's indecision, you're going to make a mistake.

  Chris Pronger

  Mistake, Games, Two

  Source: www.macleans.ca

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• To shirk taking of vows betrays indecision and want of resolution.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Want, Vow, Resolution

  Mahatma Gandhi (1950). “The Good Life”

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• Fears, indecision, and frustration feed on words. Without words they usually stop. . . . Words are at times good for looking back, but they are confining when I need to act in the present.

  Hugh Prather

  Fear, Frustration, Needs

  Hugh Prather (1983). “Notes to Myself”, Bantam

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• If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead.

  Adam Haslett

  Bars, Shooting, Haze

  "How To Write a (Good) Sentence" by Adam Haslett, www.slate.com. January 23, 2011.

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• Tucker was my safe place for three years, my secure dock in a sea of indecision as I dealt with my father's illness and death. And now I had to sink or swim. It was time to let go...and move on. Slowly, I pushed off from the dock that was Tucker Montgomery and prepared to swim...praying I wouldn't drown.

  Melissa Brown

  Letting Go, Father, Moving

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• There are tons of things in your home and life that you don't use, need, or even particularly want. They just came into your life as impulsive flotsam and jetsam and never found a good exit. Whether you're aware of it or not, this clutter creates indecision and distractions.

  Tim Ferriss

  Home, Exit, Needs

  "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich". Book by Timothy Ferriss, 2007.

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• The attractions of ceramics lie partly in its contradictions. It is both difficult and easy, with an element beyond our control. It is both extremely fragile and durable. Like 'Sumi' ink painting, it does not lend itself to erasures and indecision.

  Isamu Noguchi

  Lying, Difficult And Easy, Ink

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• Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  T. S. Eliot

  Window Panes, Tea, Vision

  T. S. Eliot (2014). “The Waste Land and Other Poems”, p.10, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• They were close enough that he could feel the hurried beat of her heart. He could feel Charlotte's indecision in every word she didn't say and every move she didn't make. She was tense with uncertainty, quivering with irresolution. She might not be leaning into him, but she wasn't pulling away, either.

  Lauren Willig

  Moving, Heart, Might

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• All morning, Spence has been a well-oiled machine of activity. Everyone doing her bit, quietly and efficiently. It's strange how deliberate people are after a death. All the indecision suddenly vanishes into clear, defined moments--changing the linens, choosing a dress or a hymn, the washing up, the muttering of prayers. All the small, simple, conscious acts of living a sudden defense against the dying we do every day.

  Libba Bray

  Morning, Prayer, Simple

  Libba Bray (2010). “A Great and Terrible Beauty”, p.245, Simon and Schuster

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• things which in my mind blossom will stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear capable of fragility and indecision

  e. e. cummings

  Mind, Fragility, Disguise

  E. E. Cummings (1996). “Tulips and Chimneys”, p.155, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Choice is the keynote of self-determinism. To determine anything, you must have the choice to determine. Choice to determine means that you must have the power of decision. Decision and time have a lot in common. When we have clean, clear decision, we have clean, clear time. And when we have indecision, there is an unclarity about time.

  L. Ron Hubbard

  Mean, Self, Choices

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• The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Black And White, Night, Squares

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• Every man hath the right to doubt his task, and to forsake it from time to time; but what he must not do is forget it. Whoever doubteth not himself is unworthy -for in his unquestioning belief in his ability, he commiteth the sin of pride. Blessed are they who go through moments of indecision.

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Inspiration, Blessed

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• After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama's reaction was one of moral indecision and equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia's Putin to invade Ukraine next.

  Sarah Palin

  Army, Russia, Ukraine

  “Palin on Ukraine: I called it” by Aaron Blake, www.washingtonpost.com. March 3, 2014.

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• I hope that I'm not the type of person who, standing at the doorway to hell, strikes a heroic pose and then starts frowning with indecision.

  Liu Xiaobo

  Frowning, Doorways, Heroic

  "Liu Xiaobo: China's Poet-Dissident" by Suzanne Nossel, www.politico.com. December 28, 2017.

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• Indecision is debilitating; it feeds upon itself; it is, one might almost say, habit-forming. Not only that, but it is contagious; it transmits itself to others. . . . Business is dependent upon action. It cannot go forward by hesitation. Those in executive positions must fortify themselves with facts and accept responsibility for decisions based upon them. Often greater risk is involved in postponement than in making a wrong decision.

  Heinz Hopf

  Business, Responsibility, Decision

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• And yet one can't forever stand on the shore; at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.

  Arthur Miller

  Forever, Doubt, Life Is

  "The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller".

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• Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct, which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon another.

  Jane Addams

  Believe, Ideas, Suffering

  Jane Addams (2016). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.15, Youcanprint

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• 1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.

  Jacques Derrida

  Mean, Play, Differences

  "Positions" by Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, (p. 21), 1982.

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