Quotes About Freedom

My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you're never around assholes. That's the two things to really fight for in life.

I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?

It wasn't until I started reading ... that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.

Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag.

I believe that if a seven-year old kid has heard of Naked Lunch and is daring enough to want to read it, he's old enough to read it.

Nothing shouts midlife crisis louder than driving a convertible.

It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else

The entire piece has been devised with the French in mind. In France, fornication in the streets with total strangers is *compulsory*.

I knew that I had to free myself from any constraints that would prevent the pursuit of these dreams.

Life's pretty good, and why wouldnt it be? I'm a pirate, after all.

When you move beyond your fear, you feel free.

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It's akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to.

See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn't bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.

Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature... But is is not necessary to be a prisoner of old karma.

Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (….)

When we commit ourselves to paying attention in an open way, without falling prey to our own likes and dislikes, opinions and prejudices, projections and expectations, new possibilities open up and we have a chance to free ourselves from the straitjacket of unconsciousness.

Everything can be taken from a human being but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

not get caught in their habitual patterning, to see thoughts for what they are, impersonal events, and instead be the knowing that awareness already is. Then, in that moment at least, we are already free, ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding — not always as we think it should, but definitely as it is.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." MBSR

When we identify ourselves with a permanent, solid "self," it is a delusion of consciousness, a form of self-imprisonment, according to Einstein. Elsewhere he wrote that "the true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.

It does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative, and can make all the difference between endless imprisonment in pain and suffering and freedom from suffering

We see that thoughts, when brought into and held in awareness in this way, readily lose their power to dominate and dictate our responses to life, no matter what their content and emotional charge. They then become workable rather than imprisoning. And thus, we become a bit freer in the knowing and the recognizing of them as events in the field of awareness.

Ultimately, it is our mindlessness that imprisons us. We get better and better at being out of touch with the full range of our possibilities, and more and more stuck in our cultivated-over-a-lifetime habits of not-seeing, but only reacting and blaming.

These were people who hunted for a way to erase the haunted, malnourished gaze from their souls and replace it with their faith in freedom and safety.