Life Celebration Quotes
Crafted with the reader in mind, this collection is clearly divided by themes:
Alan Watts
A man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself… until he has released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position.
The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated “egos” inside bags of skin.
Albert Camus
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it’s a hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
Albert Einstein
Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.
Arthur Schopenhauer
We can only be entirely ourselves as long as we are alone; therefore, whoever does not love solitude, also does not love freedom; for only when we are alone, are we free.
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.
Bob Marley
Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life.
Carl Jung
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside, awakes.
Charles Bukowski
Perfection sucks me, it repels me. All those women and men seeking perfection in society's created stereotypes make me sick. Fucking meat mannequins, no personality or self love. Same clothes, same music, same expressions, same foods, same fuckers, same cars, same lives... and in the end? Same mass neural suicides. Because living like a car is without a doubt a suicide. When everyone is the same, everyone is nobody. Perfection is a bird in a cage that lives, eats, shits and dies with the only purpose of being admired. I want to live free, spunky, cold-hearted, malnourished but free.
Deepak Chopra
Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both.
Epictetus
Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.
No man is free who is not master of himself.
Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle. Some things are within your control and some things aren’t.
Franz Kafka
You are free, and that is why you are lost.
Friedrich Nietzsche
He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.
Georgia O'Keefe
I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
Henry David Thoreau
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Hermann Hesse
“When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks… Seeking means having a goal. But finding means being free, being open, having no goal.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.
Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Man is condemned to be free because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Religions may assert freedom in another world; but freedom of the mind all religions have denied, actually, because they have imposed on the mind beliefs, dogmas, rituals and fear.
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
Freedom may involve utter, complete, absolute insecurity and one is frightened of being completely insecure.
Are you free? You are conditioned by your culture, by your climate, by your religion, by your books; are you free? You might like to be free, you might talk endlessly about free will, but have you a will that is free? Can the will ever be free?
The world doesn't want you to think, it doesn't want you to be free to find out, because then you would be a dangerous citizen, you would not fit into the established pattern.
We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.
To be free comes not from changing or fixing this world, but from seeing this world as it is and opening the heart in the midst of it.
John Stuart Mill
The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.
Robert Anton Wilson
The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
Soren Kierkegaard
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it, weep over them, you will also regret that; laugh at the world’s follies or weep over them, you will regret both. This… is the sum and substance of all philosophy.
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Other Voices
For these sections without caricature the quote comes first, the cited person after. In case you are using text-to-speech be aware.
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
Amiri Baraka
Of course life has no point. If it had, man would not be free, he'd become a slave to that point and his life would be governed by completely new criteria: the criteria of slavery. Like an animal, the point of whose life is that life itself, the continuation of the species.
An animal carries out its slavish activities because it can feel the point of its life instinctively. Therefore its sphere is restricted. Man, on the other hand, claims to aspire to the absolute.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
Real freedom lies in the wilderness, not civilization.
Charles Lindbergh
No man on earth is truly free, All are slaves of money or necessity. Public opinion or fear of prosecution forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.
Euripides
A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
Ezra Pound
We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.
George Orwell
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population - the intelligent ones or the fools?
Henrik Ibsen
My view is, without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts or whereases, that freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have or the views they express or the words they speak or write.
Hugo Black
If your “freedom” relies on my oppression, then neither of us are free.
Ilhan Omar
Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.
James Baldwin
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.
Jim Morrison
Freedom itself demands discomfort.
Mark Manson
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
Maximilien de Robespierre
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela
Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
Rosa Luxemburg
Your perspective will either become your prison or your passport. It will either confine you to the way things are, or launch you into the way things are meant to be.
Steven Furtick
So you know what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us make their way into those positions of power... So what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state, I mean, what we are, are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.
Terence McKenna
I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery
Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps from Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.
There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf