Quotes About Autonomy

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. [ The New Statesman , February 25, 1933]

All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.

Exactly, I will lay down the law for nobody, not even myself. The thought of death and the afterlife saves me from doing any more. . . . As the thought of Eternity helps me.

I only want one thing of men, and that is, that they should leave me alone.

But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account. A woman could take a man without really giving herself away. Certainly she could take him without giving herself into his power. Rather she could use this sex thing to have power over him.

Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that

Any man's a fool who lets himself be a wage-earning slave, today.

I'd be ashamed to see a woman walking around with my name-label on her, address and railway station, like a wardrobe trunk.

We are the masterless." That is what the American Eagle shrieks. It's a Hen-Eagle.

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far lessfree. The freest are perhaps least free.

No one likes to feel that he or she is being sold something or told to do a thing. We much prefer to feel that we are buying of our own accord or acting on our own ideas. We like to be consulted about our wishes, our wants, our thoughts. Take the case of Eugene Wesson.

Now that she thought of it, why couldn't anyone do anything he or she wished, given the tools and the time?

It's as if the work on your canvas has a will of its own. When that happens, it can be quite exciting. But disturbing, too, when, as the painter, you are not in control of your painting.

Don't you ever become some man's personal toilet the way I did

I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out.

A simple separate person is not contained between his hat and his boots.

Freedom: to walk free and own no superior

I will not descend among professors and capitalists.

From this hour, freedom! Going where I like, my own master...

A heroic person walks at his ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits him not.

not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you, you must travel for yourself.

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

As long as I shall live I shall always be My Self-and no other, Just Me.

I've learned over the years that when you have really good people you don't have to baby them," Jobs later explained. "By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.