Critical Junctures Quotes

It is said that history turns on small hinges. A human career, too, results from an accumulating series of decisions about large and small matters over a period of years. But the catch is that you can never know when a seemingly small decision may prove to be, from the vantage of later years, the big decision of your life.

There are moments that define a person's whole life. MOMENTS in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become hinge on a single decision.

History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

As you go through life, there are thousands of little forks in the road, and there are a few really big forks-those moments of reckoning, moments of truth.

There's no one defining moment that kills you or makes you.

The significant, life-forming times are the dull, in-between times.

There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.

One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.

I am very interested in the small decisions people make that do set you on a different road in your life. As much as we have influence over what kind of person we're going to become, there are little tests along the way.

There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.

Sometimes it's the smallest decisions that can change your life forever.

But there are times in life when a door opens and you are offered a glimpse of the light on the water, and you know that if you don't take it, that door slams shut, and maybe forever. Maybe you fool yourself into thinking that you had a choice at all; maybe you were always going to say yes. Maybe refusing was no more a choice than is holding your breath. You were always going to breathe. You were always going to say yes.

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

Because this exact leaf had to grow in that exact way, in that exact place, so that precise wind could tear it from that precise branch and make it fly into this exact face at that exact moment. And, if just one of those tiny little things had never had happened, I'd never have met ya. Which makes this leaf the most important leaf in human history

The most important moments rarely come at a convenient time

Everyone in life has those critical moments in their life when they know that something they did or didn't do would affect their future.

Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don't do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you never get a chance again.

We all have life-defining moments. They are like open-book tests, but we don't know we have been examined until it is over.

I have been around at a time when important things needed to be done.

You know when I say that things happen in matches? Well, it just happened there.