#ran

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peace ↗

— Dean Koontz

#loneliness #peace #reflection #solitude #tranquility

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

We must realize that the Reformation world view leads in the direction of government freedom. But the humanist world view with inevitable certainty leads in the direction of statism. This is so because humanists, having no god, must put something at the center, and it is inevitably society, government, or the state. ↗

— Francis A. Schaeffer

#christianity #francis-schaeffer #legal-theory #politics #reformed

A city which belongs to just one man is no true city ↗

— Sophocles

#tyranny #freedom

There is a yearning that is as spiritual as it is sensual. Even when it degenerates into addiction, there is something salvageable from the original impulse that can only be described as sacred. Something in the person (dare we call it a soul?) wants to be free, and it seeks its freedom any way it can. ... There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit in even the most sensual of desires. ↗

— Mark Epstein

#buddhism #desire #freedom #suffering #transcendence

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#expect #liberty #translated

Freedom is sloppy. But since tyranny's the only guaranteed byproduct of those who insist on a perfect world, freedom will have to do. ↗

— Bill Willingham

#bigby-wolf #freedom #storyville #tyranny #werewolf-governments

no people can be both ignorant and free. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#ignorance #freedom

Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#human #freedom

Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us. ↗

— Madeleine L'Engle

#randomness #freedom