#elf

I couldn't make sense of things. But then I began the process of civilising myself and trying to become a decent human being. I'm still working on it. ↗

— Jimmy Nail

#began #being #decent #human #human being

What a cage is to the wild beast, law is to the selfish man. ↗

— Herbert Spencer

#cage #fish man #law #man #selfish

I think he's informing himself, reaching out and getting ideas and information and advice. I haven't the slightest doubt that internally taking shape in that marvelous brain of his is a philosophy of foreign affairs. But it would be premature to say that one is fully formed. ↗

— Theodore C. Sorensen

#affairs #brain #doubt #foreign #foreign affairs

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. ↗

— Bob Marley

#independent-thought #self-reliance #song-lyrics #freedom

You said you knew the perfect place to run to. A place that was empty of people, and buildings, and far, far away. A place covered in blood-red earth and sleeping life. A place longing to come alive again. It's a place for disappearing, you'd said, a place for getting lost... and for getting found. I'll take you there, you'd said. And I could say that I agreed. ↗

— Lucy Christopher

#finding-yourself #freedom #hope #living-life-to-the-fullest #running-away

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else. I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die. ↗

— Paul Auster

#freedom #life #philosophy #self-determination #change

I haven't got the kind of discipline where I can turn my emotion inside out and then just switch off. It affects me fairly profoundly and I don't like putting myself through that kind of mincer every day. ↗

— Jimmy Nail

#day #discipline #emotion #every #every day

Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself. Nobody else can. ↗

— Michael A. Singer

#inspirational-life #inspirational-quotes #quotes-to-define-my-life #quotes-to-live-by #self-awareness

To be a writer you have to be out in the world, you have to risk yourself in the world, you have to be immersed in the world, you have to go out looking for it. This becomes harder as you get older because there's less energy, the days are shorter for older people and it's not so easy to go out and immerse oneself in the world outside. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#becomes #days #easy #energy #get

Writing has to support itself. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#support #writing