Quotes About Freedom

Had I renounced the Western world? Renunciation, at least as Buddhists use the term, is a much-misunderstood concept. It is not about giving up what is good and beautiful. How foolish that would be! Rather it is about disentangling oneself from the unsatisfactory and moving with determination toward what matters most. It is about freedom and meaning—freedom from mental confusion and self-centered afflictions, meaning through insight and loving-kindness.

Renunciation essentially means simplifying one's mind, one's words, and one's activities, by letting go of what obstructs inner freedom. Constraint creates frustration; renunciation produces a real sense of joy.

he gave such an impression of buoyancy that I expected him to fly off like a bird.

Since true happiness is not limited to momentary relief from life's ups and downs, it requires us to eliminate the major causes of unhappiness, which, as we have seen, are ignorance and mental toxins. If happiness is indeed a way of being, a state of consciousness and inner freedom, there is essentially nothing to prevent us from achieving it.

The main difference between the pursuit of knowledge in science versus the same pursuit in Buddhism is their ultimate goals. In Buddhism, knowledge is acquired essentially for therapeutic purposes. The objective is to free ourselves from the suffering that is caused by our undue attachment to the apparent reality of the external world and by our servitude to our individual egos, which we imagine reside at the center of our being.

People were always saying to Margaret, 'Well, Julia sings and Betsy writes. Now what is little Margaret going to do?' Margaret would smile politely, for she was very polite, but privately she stormed to Betsy with flashing eyes, 'I'm not going to do anything. I want to just live. Can't people just live?

She tried to act as though it were nothing to go to the library alone. But her happiness betrayed her. Her smile could not be restrained, and it spread from her tightly pressed mouth, to her round cheeks, almost to the hair ribbons tied in perky bows over her ears.

I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter.

You know I don't like being told what to do. Then do without being told.

the crows are like a harrow to unbroken ground they turn it loose they give it air

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have in it more genuine humanity.

The (ultimate) formula: 'the absolute is the subject' does not mean that there is only a subject. The 'free' is freedom of the free and the related. The absolute is the 'sameness' of the absolute and the relative. The true subject is the subjectivity of the subject and the object. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Relations with the other are always complicated...Even if we make an effort to respect the autonomy of the other, even if we grant the other freedom, the other will never feel completely free since he receives his freedom in a partnership.

We are not accusing liberalism of being a system of violence; we reproach it with not seeing its own face in violence, with veiling the pact upon which it rests while rejecting as barbarous that other source of freedom—revolutionary freedom which is the origin of all social pacts.

There is no freedom without a field.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists

There is in all expression a spontaneity which will not take orders, not even those which I would like to give to myself.

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

Psychoanalysis is, indeed, in the final analysis, existential psychoanalysis, but not in Sartre's sense, that is to say, as revelation of a position taken by 'freedom,' but as revelation of intercorporeality, of the ego-others assembly such as it is realized by each, of the symbolic system set up in our machine for living.