Quotes About Freedom

We hadn't yet traded freedom for comfort.

Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life—six weeks, four months, two years—to travel the world on your own terms.

vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests

no combination of one-week or ten-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. —EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE

vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.

And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Listen: we are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different! —KURT VONNEGUT, TIMEQUAKE

Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking. —ANTONIO MACHADO, CANTARES

A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry." —PAUL THEROUX, QUOTING TONY THE BEACHCOMBER, IN THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA    In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.

Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.

vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what. —GEORGE SANTAYANA, "THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)

There is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.

if the person did not have anxiety, he or she would also not have freedom. Anxiety demonstrates that values, no matter how beclouded, do exist in the person. Without values there would be only barren despair.

Where there is 'freedom from' without corresponding interrelationship, there is the anxiety of the defiant and isolated individual. Where there is dependence without freedom, there is the anxiety of the clinging person who cannot live outside a symbiosis.

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.