Fetters Quotes

Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters. You did rightly. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

God never under any conditions binds His creation with fetters; He awakens it through constant changes to ever new life. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. ~ Edmund Burke

There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind. This is the restlessness of the germ within the seed, struggling upward and downward towards its proper life.it is a striving full of pain, the cutting of tender flesh by the fetters of the captive as he struggles against their pitilessness. ~ Anna Brackett

If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

There are sins of omission and sins of commission, my friend. I've dealt with mine and i've forgiven myself ... you should do the same. ~ Will Fetters

You have fettered yourself of your own free will, man-break the fetters! ~ Halldor Laxness

The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former ... [T]he historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. ~ Karl Marx

But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs - is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter. ~ Max Stirner

But, for all that, there is a Beyond, and he who has once caught a glance of it, is like a man who has gazed at the sun - wherever he looks, everywhere he sees the image of the sun. Speak to him of finite things, and he will tell you that the Finite is impossible and meaningless without the Infinite. Speak to him of death, and he will call it birth ; speak to him of time, and he will call it the mere shadow of eternity. To us the senses seem to be the organs, the tools, the most powerful engines of knowledge ; to him they are, if not actually deceivers, at all events heavy fetters, checking the flight of the spirit. To us this earth, this life, all that we see, and hear, and touch is certain. Here, we feel, is our home, here lie our duties, here our pleasures. To him this earth is a thing that once was not, and that again will cease to be ; this life is a short dream from which we shall soon awake. Of nothing he professes greater ignorance than of what to others seems to be most certain, namely what we see, and hear, and touch ; and as to our home, wherever that may be, he knows that certainly it is not here. ~ F. Max Müller

Modesty is an excellent quality, honey. Don't lose that. ~ Will Fetters

This political disorder found expression in Machiavelli Prince. In the absence of any guiding principle, politics becomes a naked struggle for power; The Prince gives shrewd advice as to how to play this game successfully. What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion. ~ Bertrand Russell

Socialism is nothing more nor less than the social, political and ideological system which breaks the fetters upon economic growth created under capitalism and opens the way to a new period of economic and social expansion on a much larger scale. ~ Earl Browder

To this wonderful page in our country's history another more glorious still will be added, and the slave shall show at last to his free brothers a sharpened sword forged from the links of his fetters. ~ Giuseppe Garibaldi

Jiu Jitsu has shown me that we are not confined to the lot which we inherit. We are not bound to these fetters eternally. They are temporal. We can transcend them should we sincerely choose to. Sincere effort is in fact the rarest virtue among man. ~ Chris Matakas

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with there capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. ~ Karl Marx

The fetters have burst ~ M.D. Lachlan

Ye youths and virgins, when your generous blood Has drunk the warmth of fifteen summers, now The loves invite; now to new rapture wakes The finish'd sense: while stung with keen desire The madd'ning boy his bashful fetters bursts; And, urg'd with secret flames, the riper maid, Conscious and shy, betrays her smarting breast. ~ John Armstrong

The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away. ~ Charles Dickens

Loki was now captured, and with no thought of mercy he was taken to a cave. They [the Aesir] took three flat stones and, setting them on their edges, broke a hole through each of them. Then they caught Loki's sons, Vali and Nari or Narfi. The Aesir changed Vali into a wolf, and he ripped apart his brother Narfi. Next the Aesir took his guts, and with them they bound Loki on to the top of the three stones – one under his shoulders, a second under his loins and the third under his knees. The fetters became iron. 'Then Skadi took a poisonous snake and fastened it above Loki so that its poison drips on to his face. But Sigyn, his wife, placed herself beside him from where she holds a bowl to catch the drops of venom. When the bowl becomes full, she leaves to pour out the poison, and at that moment the poison drips on to Loki's face. He convulses so violently that the whole earth shakes – it is what is known as an earthquake. He will lie bound there until Ragnarok. ~ Snorri Sturluson

Don't let people supervise your life, If you know who you are, you shouldn't be living in that prison of dominance, live by your orders, you are your own soldier. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. ~ William Blake

Meanwhile, the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles,
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts
when the Father eases the fetters off the frost
and unravels the water-ropes. He who wields power
over time and tide: He is the true Lord. ~ Seamus Heaney

Let us imagine a number of men in fetters, and all condemned to death, some of whom are executed each day in the sight of the others, so that the survivors see their own state in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at one another in sorrow and without hope. That is a picture of the human condition. ~ Balise Pascal

Laila And The Khalifa

The Khalifa said to Laila,
"Art thou really she
For whom Majnun lost his head
and went distracted?
Thou art not fairer than many
other fair ones."
She replied, "Be silent;
thou art not Majnun!"


If thou hadst Majnun's eyes,
The two worlds would be within thy view.
Thou art in thy senses, but Majnun is beside himself.
In love to be wide awake is treason.
The more a man is awake, the more he sleeps (to love);
His (critical) wakefulness is worse than slumbering.


Our wakefulness fetters our spirits,
Then our souls are a prey to divers whims,
Thoughts of loss and gain and fears of misery.
They retain not purity, nor dignity, nor lustre,
Nor aspiration to soar heavenwards.
That one is really sleeping who hankers after each whim
And holds parley with each fancy. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Signs are my food, drink are my tears; Clinking of fetters such music would crave; Stink and close air, away my life wears Innocency is all the hope I have. - Sir Thomas Wyatt ~ David Johnson

You can love someone and not like spending time with them. ~ Will Fetters

My soul, if thou wouldst be enlarged into human sympathy, thou must be narrowed into limits of human suffering. Joseph's dungeon is the road to Joseph's throne. Thou canst not lift the iron load of thy brother if the iron hath not entered into thee. It is thy limit that is thine enlargement. It is the shadows of thy life that are the real fulfillment of thy dreams of glory. Murmur not at the shadows; they are better revelations than thy dreams. Say not that the shades of the prison-house have fettered thee; thy fetters are wings -- wings of flight into the bosom of humanity. The door of thy prison-house is a door into the heart of the universe. God has enlarged thee by the binding of sorrow's chain ~ George Matheson

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism. ~ Edward Gibbon

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will. ~ Virginia Woolf

There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters. ~ Henry David Thoreau

All his life long he had been amazed at the way ideas have of agglomerating, divorced from feeling, like crystals in strange, meaningless formations; and of growing like tumors, devouring the flesh that conceives them; or of assuming certain human lineaments, but in monstrous wise, like those inert masses to which some women give birth, and which are, after all, only the incoherent dreams of matter. He found that a goodly number of the mind's productions are no more than such deformed mooncalves. Other conceptions, less impure and more precise, forged as if by a master workman, make for illusion when viewed from afar; though commanding our admiration for their parallels and their angles, like intricate iron grills, they are nevertheless only bars behind which the understanding imprisons itself, abstract fetters already eaten into by the rust of false premises. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

Writing: such has been my crime ever since I was a small child. To this day writing remains my crime. Now, although I am out of prison, I continue to live inside a prison of another sort, one without steel bars. For the technology of oppression and might without justice has become more advanced, and the fetters imposed on mind and body have become invisible. The most dangerous shackles are the invisible ones, because they deceive people into believing they are free. This delusion is the new prison that people inhabit today, north and south, east and west...We inhabit the age of the technology of false consciousness, the technology of hiding truths behind amiable humanistic slogans that may change from one era to another...Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned. ~ Nawal El Saadawi

Several times when we tried to talk about our future, she told me she had the feeling that now my last great chance was presenting itself, and that I must not miss it. Did she really just mean the paralyzing compromises we had gotten ensnared in, out of indifference or false respect, and which now no longer bound us because a higher power had severed them? Or did she mean something beyond these fetters, which, after all, are only fetters if they are experienced as such and perhaps are beneficent fetters because they deceive us about the time spent waiting for the hour of fulfillment - did Misi also mean that the terrible desert of preparation had been traversed? ~ Hans Erich Nossack

Go, little book, to our unfathomed friend, Above his silvered head to build a shrine, Retreat of Wisdom, Ignorance to mend. Full oft there shall you comfort and entwine His long limbs in bookish fetters benign. Thou shalt preserve those aquamarine gems, Or Gower's friend shall cast you in the Thames. ~ Bruce Holsinger

Because capitalist society has expanded the productive forces so enormously, the social conditions under which it arose lag behind and become fetters holding back the further growth of productive forces. ~ Earl Browder

The fetters of tyranny were not stricken from America for the sake of Americans alone. ~ Orson F. Whitney

I admire one to my left, the bronze sun is behind him as he falls, silhouetting him, immortalizing him in that singular moment - one I know I shall never forget - so that he looks like a Miltonian angel falling with wrath and glory. His exoskeleton sheds its friction armor, as Lucifer might have shed the fetters of heaven, feathers of flame peeling off, fluttering behind. Then a missile slashes the sky and high-grade explosives christen him mortal once again. ~ Pierce Brown

realized during the practice that a lot of what was holding me back originated from my fear of pain and suffering, and once I found myself capable of breathing in the pain and suffering of myself and others, and comfortable radiating kindness, love, and compassion, a lot of the fetters holding me back dissolved away. ~ Chade-Meng Tan

What use would wings be to a man bound in iron fetters? They would only drive him to even greater despair. ~ Adelbert Von Chamisso

It is the custom on the stage: in all good, murderous melodramas: to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; and, in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger; drawing forth a dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and, just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest pitch, a whistle is heard: and we are straightway transported to the great hall of the castle: where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of places from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company, carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would seem at first sight. The transitions in real life from well-spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday garments, are not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of passive lookers-on; which makes a vast difference. The actors in the mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and prep ~ Charles Dickens

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart
The heart which love of thee alone can bind; And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd
To fetters and damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom. ~ Lord Byron

Thus not in vain is that power of the intellect which ever seeketh, yea, and achieveth the addition of space to space, mass to mass, unity to unity, number to number, by the science which dischargeth us from the fetters of a most narrow kingdom and promoteth us to the freedom of a truly august realm, which freeth us from an imagined poverty and straitness to the possession of the myriad riches of so vast a space, of so worthy a field, of so many most cultivated worlds. This science doth not permit that the arch of the horizon that our deluded vision imagineth over the earth and that by our fantasy is feigned in the spacious ether, shall imprison our spirit under the custody of a Pluto or at the mercy of a Jove. We are spared the thought of so wealthy an owner and subsequently of so miserly, sordid and avaricious a donor. Nor need we accept nourishment from a nature so fecund and pregnant, and then so wretched, mean and niggard in her fruit. ~ Giordano Bruno

Repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, from unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy. And what of contemplation? Its very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover, it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition. ~ Josef Pieper

MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so - because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious. ~ Mark Twain

So Columbus said, somebody show me the sunset and somebody did and he set sail for it, And he discovered America and they put him in jail for it, And the fetters gave him welts, And they named America after somebody else. ~ Ogden Nash

Awake! thou that sleepest, arise from the dead! The Lord still lives today. His power has never abated. His Word has never changed. The things He did in Bible days, He still lives to do today. Not a burden is there He cannot bear nor a fetter He cannot break. ~ Aimee Semple McPherson

A djinn I am.
My fetters may be broke but
still they wrap round wrist and
ankle:
every djinn's possessed.

The comet they speak of and know
not where it falls,
the love that glows like a lantern
down a road which
means nothing to the fearful:
Those passing see it as a mount,
which keeps you clear of sword
and spike
but holds you up to arrows;
I pass, my shade lashed to my foot,
love eating my soul like an acid;
The dunes change places in the
night without my leave;
The walls around me and their
guards in watches
cannot halt the full moon's com-
ing to my heart
before it's even risen and I've seen
it and
its silver floods my soul.
Here it is with a mattock, shatter-
ing everything inside me.

Translated by Robin Moger ~ Hermes

Fondnesse it were for any being free,
To covet fetters, though they golden bee. ~ Edmund Spenser

When boyhood's fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen
Of Greece and Rome who bravely stood
Three hundred men and three men

And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain
And Ireland long a province be
A nation once again ~ Thomas Osborne Davis

Wealth: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilites from which only Death can file their fetters. ~ Elbert Hubbard

The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad. ~ James Madison

Miss Tox sat down upon the widow-seat, and thought of her good Papa deceased - Mr. Tox, of the Customs Department of the public service; and of her childhood, passed at a seaport, among a considerable quantity of cold tar, and some rusticity. She fell into a softened remembrance of meadows, in old time, gleaming with buttercups, like so many inverted firmaments of golden stars; and how she had made chains of dandelion-stalks for youthful vowers of eternal constancy, dressed chiefly in nankeen; and how soon those fetters had withered and broken. ~ Charles Dickens

Should we Knights, in years to come, dwindle into memory, perhaps the world will recall that in the days of our demise we stood, hewing at the fetters of captive men. ~ A.S. Peterson

Golden fetters are no less galling to a self-respecting man that iron ones; the sting lies in the fetters, not in the metal. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I was most confusedly in love ... Even though I resolved not to think of him, his face would keep appearing between me and a book I tried to read, or his voice would suddenly sound instead of the words I tried to write on a page ... I found love annoying and uncomfortable, like fetters, until I got used to it. ~ Nora Waln

Women didn't come into men's rooms and sink into men's Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Moral spontaneity" corresponds entirely with "religious and orthodox philosophy", "constitutional monarchy", "the Christian state", "freedom with certain limits", or in a figure, to the hero fetters to a sick bed. ~ Max Stirner

There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves. ~ Barry Unsworth

This state of affairs, which bodes ill for the future, causes Us great distress and anguish. But We cherish this hope: that distrust and selfishness among nations will eventually be overcome by a stronger desire for mutual collaboration and a heightened sense of solidarity. We hope that the developing nations will take advantage of their geographical proximity to one another to organize on a broader territorial base and to pool their efforts for the development of a given region. We hope that they will draw up joint programs, coordinate investment funds wisely, divide production quotas fairly, and exercise management over the marketing of these products. We also hope that multilateral and broad international associations will undertake the necessary work of organization to find ways of helping needy nations, so that these nations may escape from the fetters now binding them; so that they themselves may discover the road to cultural and social progress, while remaining faithful to the native genius of their land. ~ Pope Paul VI

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare
where others lack the courage
to plunge again into the elemental. ~ Thomas Mann

Now you see only the mystery of this great sorrow; then you shall see how the threatening enemy was swept away in the wild night of fear and grief.
Now you look only at the loss; then you shall see how it struck at the evil that had begun to rivet its fetters upon you.
Now you shrink from the howling winds and muttering thunders; then you shall see how they beat back the waters of destruction, and opened up your way to the goodly land of promise. ~ Mark Guy Pearse

Fear sometimes adds wings to the heels, and sometimes nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving. ~ Michel De Montaigne

I was seized on the 8th of June, 1824, in consequence of the war with Bengal and, in company with Dr. Price, three Englishmen, one American, and one Greek, was thrown into the death prison at Ava, where we lay eleven months - nine months in three pairs and two months in five pairs of fetters. ~ Adoniram Judson

Haste trips up its own heels, fetters and stops itself. ~ Seneca The Younger

I wanted to get to the most essential aspect of my being, and look around for a while. I wanted to explore what I am in my most basic self. I wanted to chip away at all of the nonsense I have acquired through my twenty-nine years on this earth. I wanted to find truth. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats. Jiu Jitsu has peeled the veil of daily life, and has shown me what lies beyond the curtain. We willingly accept the chains that circumstance forces upon us, and we grow to find comfort in them. We attach various fetters of day-to-day living to our being, and we do so with a smile. We accept these constraints for they come in the way of comfort. We accept conformity for it appears the path of least resistance. We strive toward the middle, and we run from ourselves. ~ Chris Matakas

...it was Buddhism that inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner. This Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Léon Poliakov, to free themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters. ~ Joscelyn Godwin

The Hindu views life as the opportunity to fulfill karmic obligations (dharma), indulge the ego with worldly power (artha), gratify the senses with worldly pleasure (kama), and discover the spirit (moksha). He can either react to samsara or simply witness it. The former fetters, the latter liberates. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik

When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species. ~ Karl Marx

The false contrasts which the people, and consequently the language, believes in, are always dangerous fetters which impede the march of truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

A "free spirit" - this cool expression does good in every condition, it almost warms. One no longer lives, in the fetters of love and hatred, without Yea, without Nay, voluntarily near, voluntarily distant, preferring to escape, to turn aside, to flutter forth, to fly up and away; one is fastidious like everyone who has once seen an immense variety beneath him, - and one has become the opposite of those who trouble themselves about things which do not concern them. In fact, it is nothing but things which now concern the free spirit, - and how many things! - which no longer trouble him! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

However weighed down and entangled in earthly fetters you may be, it can never be too late. ~ Tito Colliander

I am about to break into a dimension of the impossible. To enter this realm., I must set my mind (hypnotize myself) free from the earthly fetters that bind it. If the events to witness are unbelievable, it is only because my imagination is chained. So I now sit back, relax, and believe...so that I may cross the brink of time and space...into that land we sometimes visit in our dreams -- my horrific forsaken dreams. ~ Chris Mentillo

No one has ever explained why it is that parents and guardians consider dull people such safe matrimonial investments for their young charges. Even granting the unsound assumption that dull people are more apt to be content with their own matrimonial fetters, they are certainly more apt to be the cause of discontent in others. ~ Alice Duer Miller

Belief in karma ought to make the life pure, strong, serene, and glad. Only our own deeds can hinder us; only our own will can fetter us. Once let men recognize this truth, and the hour of their liberation has struck. Nature cannot enslave the soul that by wisdom has gained power and uses both in love. ~ Annie Besant

Words, even the most ephemeral ones are facts, as heavy as fetters, they leave deep marks. ~ Aldo Busi

Baby's World
I wish I could take a quiet corner in the heart of my baby's very
own world.
I know it has stars that talk to him, and a sky that stoops
down to his face to amuse him with its silly clouds and rainbows.
Those who make believe to be dumb, and look as if they never
could move, come creeping to his window with their stories and with
trays crowded with bright toys.
I wish I could travel by the road that crosses baby's mind,
and out beyond all bounds;
Where messengers run errands for no cause between the kingdoms
of kings of no history;
Where Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them, the Truth
sets Fact free from its fetters. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

When you return, the youngest of the seers, Released from fetters of ancestral pose, There will be beauty waiting down the years Revisions of the ruby and the rose. ~ Nathalia Crane

Anarchism rouses man to rebellion against this black monster. Break your mental fetters, says Anarchism to man, for not until you think and judge for yourself will you get rid of the dominion of darkness, the greatest obstacle to all progress. ~ Emma Goldman

Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment. ~ Virginia Woolf

An oppressed people are authorized whenever
they can to rise and break their fetters. ~ Henry Clay

We women are weak," replied Bimala. "So I suppose we must join in the conspiracy of the weak."
"Women weak!" I exclaimed with a laugh. "Men belaud you as delicate and fragile, so as to delude you into thinking yourselves weak. But it is you women who are strong. Men make a great outward show of their so-called freedom, but those who know their inner minds are aware of their bondage. They have
manufactured scriptures with their own hands to bind themselves; with their very idealism they have made golden fetters of women to wind round their body and mind. If men had not that extraordinary faculty of entangling themselves in meshes of their own contriving, nothing could have kept them bound. But as for
you women, you have desired to conceive reality with body and soul. You have given birth to reality. You have suckled reality at your breasts. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Never give up! it is wiser and betterAlways to hope, than once to despair.Fling off the load of Doubt's cankering fetter,And break the dark spell of tyrannical care. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

The only chains God wants us to wear are the chains of righteousness
not the chains of hopeless subjectivism, not the shackles of risk-free living, not the fetters of horoscope decision making
just the chains befitting a bond servant of Christ Jesus. Die to self. Live for Christ. And then do what you want, and go where you want, for God's glory. ~ Kevin DeYoung

What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes. ~ Edward Sapir

Always remember, love's very nature is to break the ties and fetters that try to restrain it, it will make a mockery of those who mock it, and will drive even the stoutest of them who try to destroy it to their knees. When you choose love, you choose greatness, because love is our greatest ally. ~ F.E. Feeley Jr.

Precedents are treated by powerful minds as fetters with which to bind down the weak, as reasons with which to mistify the moderately informed, and as reeds which they themselves fearlessly break through whenever new combinations and difficult emergencies demand their highest efforts. ~ Charles Babbage

Profuseness is a cruel and crafty demon, that gradually involves her followers in dependence and debt; that is, fetters them with irons that enter into their souls. ~ Samuel Johnson

He had long observed with disapprobation and contempt the superstition which governed Madrid's inhabitants. His good sense had pointed out to him the artifices of the monks, and the gross absurdity of their miracles, wonders, and suppositious relics. He blushed to see his countrymen, the dupes of deceptions, so ridiculous, and only wished for an opportunity to free them from their monkish fetters. That opportunity, so long desired in vain, was at length presented to him. He resolved not to let it slip, but to set before the people, in glaring colours, how enormous were the abuses but too frequently practised in monasteries, and how unjustly public esteem was bestowed indiscriminately upon all who wore a religious habit. He longed for the moment destined to unmask the hypocrites, and convince his countrymen, that a sanctified exterior does not always hide a virtuous heart. ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis

Animals in zoos and prisoners sleep many hours a day. Like them I have become a devotee, a voluptuary of sleep, a connoisseur of its intense, uncharted pleasures. Sleep slips the chains of this life, snaps the intimate fetters of my skin, sets me free to travel the wild landscapes of the ungoverned mind. ~ Anna Lyndsey

Hate is of all things the mightiest divider, nay, is division itself. To couple hatred, therefore, though wedlock try all her golden links, and borrow to tier aid all the iron manacles and fetters of law, it does but seek to twist a rope of sand. ~ John Milton

We take our fetters with us; our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind; our imagination is full of them. ~ Michel De Montaigne

We make no apology then for raising our voices loud to a world that is ripening in sin the lord has said, Say nothing but repentance unto this generation; The adversary is subtle, cunning, he knows that he cannot induce good men and women immediately to do major evils so he moves slyly, whispering half truths until he has his intended victims following him finally he clamps his chains upon them and fetters them tight, and then he laughs at their discomfiture and their misery. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name thee my all.
Let only that little be left of my will whereby I may feel thee on every side, and come to thee in everything, and offer to thee my love every moment. Let only that little be left of me whereby I may never hide thee.
Let only that little of my fetters be left whereby I am bound with thy will, and thy purpose is carried out in my life
and that is the fetter of thy love. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Those who in the name of Faith embrace illusion,
kill and are killed.
Even the atheist gets God's blessings-
Does not boast of his religion;

With reverence he lights the lamp of Reason
And pays his homage not to scriptures,
But to the good in man.

The bigot insults his own religion
When he slays a man of another faith.
Conduct he judges not in the light of Reason;
In the temple he raises the blood-stained banner
And worships the devil in the name of God.

All that is shameful and barbarous through the Ages,
Has found a shelter in their temples-
Those they turn into prisons;
O, I hear the trumpet call of Destruction!
Time comes with her great broom
Sweeping all refuse away.

That which should make man free,
They turn into fetters;
That which should unite,
They turn into sword;
That which should bring love
From the fountain of the Eternal,
They turn into prison

And with its waves they flood the world.
They try to cross the river
In a bark riddled with holes;
And yet, in their anguish, whom do they blame?

O Lord, breaking false religion,
Save the blind!
Break! O break
The alter that is drowned in blood.

Let your thunder strike
Into the prison of false religion,

And bring to this unhappy land
The light of Knowledge. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Blood that was warm has now run cold
bled every day have hearts become old
Telling I am the story of my past
and of the ghosts at which it is aghast

Life as a child was a wonderful rhapsody
Free from the fetters of rational prosody
Naively making brute reality a parody
Revelling in a soul filled with life's melody

Poverty struck and child became destitute
wailing and whimpering like a wretched prostitute
Of pleasure and pain does a society constitute
for Man is not for God to substitute

Life is a parody of paradoxical Irony
Fate rules not without a touch of Tyranny
While the rich belch on their goblets of honey
the wretched etch on the tablets of agony ~ Prabhukrishna M

True artistic renewal does not mean being stripped of fetters. It means moving into new fetters. ~ Tawfiq Al-Hakim