Freedom Quotes - Page 62

Fear is the chain still wrapped around a free man’s leg

Fear is the chain that wraps around a free man’s leg.

Key the mind, and set the soul free.

Anthony Liccione

Listen to your fears, they are the doorway to your freedom.

Catherine Louise Birmingham

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.

Guy de Maupassant

The only business of the historian is to relate things exactly as they are: this he can never do as long as he is afraid

Lucian of Samosata

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?

The more we talk about our troubles and our fears, the more life we breathe into them". HS/el

At a time I used to think that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently.

The secret to life is to have no fear. When you can let go of what others think about you, how something is going to turn out, or how your past will affect your future, then you are finally living life free.

Shannon L. Alder

Life is a movement, a constant movement in relationship; and thought, trying to capture that movement in terms of the past, as memory, is afraid of life.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped.In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

The hoopoe said: 'Your heart's congealed like ice;When will you free yourself from cowardice?Since you have such a short time to live here,What difference does it make? What should you fear?The world is filth and sin, and homeless menMust enter it and homeless leave again.They die, as worms, in squalid pain; if weMust perish in this quest, that, certainly,Is better than a life of filth and grief.If this great search is vain, if my beliefIs groundless, it is right that I should die.So many errors throng the world - then whyShould we not risk this quest? To suffer blameFor love is better than a life of shame.No one has reached this goal, so why appealTo those whose blindness claims it is unreal?I'd rather die deceived by dreams than giveMy heart to home and trade and never live.We've been and heard so much - what have we learned?Not for one moment has the self been spurned;Fools gather round and hinder our release.When will their stale, insistent whining cease?We have no freedom to achieve our goalUntil from Self and fools we free the soul.To be admitted past the veil you mustBe dead to all the crowd considers just.Once past the veil you understand the WayFrom which the crowd's glib courtiers blindly stray.If you have any will, leave women's stories,And even if this search for hidden gloriesProves blasphemy at last, be sure our questIs not mere talk but an exacting test.The fruit of love's great tree is poverty;Whoever knows this knows humility.When love has pitched his tent in someone's breast,That man despairs of life and knows no rest.Love's pain will murder him and blandly askA surgeon's fee for managing the task -The water that he drinks brings pain, his breadIs turned to blood immediately shed;Though he is weak, faint, feebler than an ant,Love forces him to be her combatant;He cannot take one mouthful unawareThat he is floundering in a sea of care.

Farid ud-Din Attar

He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.

Sheldon B. Kopp

Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives.

Bernard of Clairvaux

Most of us are imprisoned by something. We're living in darkness until something flips on the switch.

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room. The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

Rabindranath Tagore

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

Winston S. Churchill

The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.

Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

Aristotle

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

The war going on within you is a reflection of every war that has ever taken place… past, present, and future. Each individual is a Spiritual Warrior and there is only one demon you must conquer…your SELF. You are the devil and you are the savior. You are a human with free will, and every morning you wake up and you make a choice.

Alaric Hutchinson

The Christian God seemed the most offensive to people precisely because he was the most godlike. He was too perfect even to be coaxed by human efforts, and therefore sent his son to do the job.

That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?

Your life is an opportunity to question, discover, and explore.

Janice Anderson

We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.

Kindness has no boundaries. It is the language of the soul.

Amit Ray

1.tWe admitted we were powerless over our emotions, that our lives had become unmanageable.2.tCame to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.3.tMade a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.4.tMade a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.5.tAdmitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.6.tWere entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.7.tHumbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.8.tMade a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.9.tMade direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.10.tContinued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.11.tSought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.12.tHaving had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to emotionally and mentally ill persons and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Jerry Hirschfield

Not allowing the mind its freedom to think and find the purpose of life takes away the vision to focus.

Amitav Chowdhury

We need a tremendous amount of energy and we dissipate it through fear but when there is this energy which comes from throwing off every form of fear, that energy itself produces the radical inward revolution.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The bird flying free has no interest in the truth, searching, or looking for a deeper meaning. The bird flying free just "is" and that is why it is free.

Princess Mazzaloulou

If I release my bird from its cage, I think I have given it freedom as I watch it fly away. But, what good to the bird is its freedom if its mind is still in the cage?

Princess Mazzaloulou

I closed my eyes and turned my face into the cold wind. When I felt it swept along my skin there was no past. No future. Just now.

A free spirit is not bound by this, that, matter, materialism or opinion. They sing, dance and flow on the wind - for they are at one with it. They are nothing and everything - void and expanse. Even space and time does not confine or define them. For they are pure energy itself.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

Life is not a competition. No one has to lose for someone else to win. A true blessing blesses everyone. A fragmented love which makes others lose will eventually turn upon itself and destroy the very thing which was being so carefully guarded. An open-hearted love will follow a course which can only lead somewhere good.

Easter blessingsAll life’s sacrifices like autumn leavesawaken our sensesand power to love and be wholeOur Mother Earth, Our Father Skyembraces our happiness and laughterPraise be to freedom and life’s seasonsPraise be to Christ’s freedom song

Ramon Ravenswood

Global betterment is a mental process, not one that requires huge sums of money or a high level of authority. Change has to be psychological.

Live simply. Deepest joy is like a flower....beautiful in essence.

Within each of us is a light, awake, encoded in the fibers of our existence. Divine ecstasy is the totality of this marvelous creation experienced in the hearts of humanity

Your greatest awakening comes, when you are aware about your infinite nature.

Amit Ray

The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.

Edmund S. Morgan

Don't be afraid of books, even the most dissident, seemingly 'immoral' ones. Culture is a sure bet in life, whether high, low, eclectic, pop, ancient or modern. And I am convinced that reading is one of the most important tools of liberation that any human being, and a contemporary Arab woman in particular, can exploit. I am not saying it is the ONLY tool, especially with all the new alternative - more visual, interactive and hasty - ways of knowledge, learning and growth. But how could I not be convinced of literature's power, when it has been my original emancipator?

To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.

[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.

When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently, we are alone with our own thoughts and one other voice. We can take our time, consider, evaluate, and digest what we read—with no commercial interruptions, no emotional music or special effects manipulation. And in spite of the advances in electronic information exchange, the book is still the most important medium for presenting ideas of substance and value, still the only real home of literature.

Andrew Clements

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions-there we have none.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book...

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.

Eric Idle

Playboy stretched his arm, patting Carlos on the back. "Well, you know what they say: If you love someone, let'em go. If they don't come back, hunt'em down and kill'em!

If I were to vote, I would intentionally vote for the goofiest candidate. It is my theory that when the people can outwit the leader, the more respected their voices will be.

Losing your job gives you the material from which life is made

Want to keep your life? Look for work, not a job

Previous 1 … 60 61 62 63 64 … 76 Next