Quotes to inspire and reflect

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Emancipation from the bondage of the soil / is no freedom for the tree.

Freedom can't be bought for nothing. If you hold her precious, you must hold all else of little worth.

When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside.

Freedom is baffling: / men having it often / know not they have it / till it is gone and / they no longer have it.

Let us forget such words, and all they mean, / as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed, / Intolerance, Bigotiy; let us renew / our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be / Himself, and free.

The dagger plunged in the name of Freedom is plunged into the breast of Freedom.

True freedom is to share / All the chains our brothers wear, / And, with heart and hand, to be / Earnest to make others free!

Man is a masterpiece of creation, if only because no amount of determinism can prevent him from believing that he acts as a free being.

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor capitalism, neither the H- bomb nor the guided missile—it is man’s eternal desire to be free and independent.

Liberty is the only true riches: of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.

Freedom is the supreme good—freedom from self-imposed limitation.

What is it that every man seeks? To be secure, to be happy, to do what he pleases without restraint and without compulsion.

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one’s freedom.

Wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have great resources, and return from far.

Though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

A part of Fate is the freedom of man. Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting in his soul.

If you cannot be free, be as free as you can.

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Freedom suppressed and again regained bites with keener fangs than freedom never endangered.

Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.

The misfortune which befalls man from his once having been a child is that his liberty was at first concealed from him, and all his life he will retain the nostalgia for a time when he was ignorant of its exigencies.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

Not every sheer truth / is the better for showing her face. Silence also / many times is the wisest thing for a man to have in his mind.

One open way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out discoveries, like wine and love.

Plain dealing is a jewel, but they that wear it are out of fashion.

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person’s expense!

In France every man is either an anvil or a hammer; he is a beater or must be beaten.

The French, for example, are a contemptible nation.

The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.

Who can help loving the land that has taught us / Six hundred and eighty-five ways to dress eggs?

How can you be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese?

Political thought in France is either nostalgic or utopian.

Tis better to be fortunate than wise.

Fortune’s a right whore: / If she give ought, she deals it in small parcels, / That she may take away all at one swoop.

Fortune sides with him who dares.

The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.

Fortune is not on the side of the faint-hearted.

Look how men live, always precariously / balanced between good and bad fortune.

Fortune's not content with knocking a man down; she sends him spinning head over heels, crash upon crash.

Luck never made a man wise.

What men call luck / Is the prerogative of valiant souls, / The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

Ill fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not.

Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate; and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.

Fortune, thou hadst no deity, if men / Had wisdom.

Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

Ah Fortune, what god is more cruel to us than thou! Flow thou delightest ever to make sport of human life!