
“Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision”
Source: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
A collection of quotes on the topic of indecision, time, timing, making.
“Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision”
Source: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
“Indecision may or may not be my problem.”
“Forgive my indecision. I am only a man.”
Lyrics, Morning View (2001)
“Once he makes up his mind, he's full of indecision.”
On President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said about Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 83.
“Patience is decisive indecision.”
#451
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
“I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”
Source: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952
“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
Source: The Conquest of Happiness
Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
“And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And a hundred visions and revisions”
“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.”
Source: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
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.
Source: 1950s, The pattern of management, 1956, p. 43; cited in: Colin Combe (2014), Introduction to Management, p.118
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment), 492 U.S. 490 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/492/490#writing-USSC_CR_0492_0490_ZC1, No. 88-605 ; decided July 3, 1989
1980s
Interview with Barbara Ellen: The Observer, Sunday 29 February 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/feb/29/features.review
quote in 1929
In a letter to his Paris art-dealer w:Léopold Zborowski, 1923; as quoted in Soutine, Monrou Wheeler, Museum of modern art, New York, 1950; p. 61
Letter to Sir Austen Henry Layard (20 October 1861) on the American Civil War, quoted in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), p. 552.
1860s
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 12 “Captain and Mayor”
1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)
“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4
Hansard, January 29, 2003: On the Iraq war.
2003
E. A. Smith, ‘ Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey (1764–1845) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11526’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 8 Sept 2012.
About
Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona
“No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis
Report on the Construction of Situations (1957)
Feels Like We Only Go Backwards, Lonerism (2012).
Letter to Lord Grenville (9 November 1810), quoted in Rory Muir, Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815 (Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 136-137.
1810s
1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.
Then again, I’m a grown man.
Like all great character assassination attempts, implication is much more effective than accusation.
Listen, I’m not somebody who really cares about polarization, political correctness or even what context can be fit into proper 40-character formatting. People can hold any opinion that they want on any subject that they choose. Just don’t proactively lie to people. It’s a simple request really, and one that we don’t hear nearly enough.
It’s for that same reason that I’d rather engage the president over his current policy failures than crazy conspiracy theories. By that same token, I would expect many of the HuffPo readers to hate me for plenty of things that I’ve actually said in the past as opposed to those made up by weak, lefty, online-commentating wieners.
Go ahead and take your foot off the “civility” gas pedal for all I care. We should all be replacing it with “honesty.”
Source: 13 February 2012 on Huffington Post https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cpac-2012-rap-video_b_1273779
Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter XV The Essential Science of Breathing
This Mortal Mountain (p. 135)
Short fiction, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (1971)