Quotes About Constraint

Necessity relieves us from the embarrassment of choice.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, 100 things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!

With enough 'ifs' we could put Paris into a bottle.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

When the air forces of the U.S., Russia, France, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others are already engaged with Isis in Syria, it's a shortage of targets rather than of aircraft that is the coalition's principal military constraint.

Whether I'm writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.

The tragedy of my job [journalist] is that I rarely get to go where I want to go. I have to go where the job takes me.

How terrible it is to have no cares, no longings. I do not fit. I feel too deeply and want too much. As cages go, it is a gilded one, but I shall not live well in it or any cage for that matter.

For now realize that you can change anything you want, but you can't change everything you want.

I do possess a certain rigidity, a certain prudishness. I hate it in myself.

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.

He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself

Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

A squeeze occurs when people have no choice but to do something, and do it right away, regardless of the costs.

People who are trapped in their jobs

Permission is the bloated corpse of freedom.

That we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking.

Moderation is never something I've been good at.

A man in debt is so far a slave.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

chained in the

How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.