Free Spirits Quotes

Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him. ~ Meister Eckhart

People ask why I always play crazy people and free spirits. I guess it is because I like to have fun. But I am more ambitious than your average free spirit. This job is hard enough that, without drive and hard work, you will never make it work. ~ Lucy Punch

I have often been asked why I maintained such a non-compromising antagonism to government and in what way I have found myself oppressed by it. In my opinion every individual is hampered by it. It exacts taxes from production. It creates tariffs, which prevent free exchange. It stands ever for the status quo and traditional conduct and belief. It comes into private lives and into most intimate personal relations, enabling the superstitious, puritanical, and distorted ones to impose their ignorant prejudice and moral servitudes upon the sensitive, the imaginative, and the free spirits. Government does this by its divorce laws, its moral censorships, and by a thousand petty persecutions of those who are too honest to wear the moral mask of respectability. In addition, government protects the strong at the expense of the weak, provides courts and laws which the rich may scorn and the poor must obey. It enables the predatory rich to make wars to provide foreign markets for the favored ones, with prosperity for the rulers and wholesale death for the ruled. However, it is not only government in the sense of the state which is destructive of every individual value and quality. It is the whole complex of authority and institutional domination which strangles life. It is the superstition, myth, pretense, evasions, and subservience which support authority and institutional domination. It is the reverence for these institutions instilled in the school, the church and the home in order th ~ Emma Goldman

A true community consists of individuals - not mere species members, not couples - respecting each others individuality and privacy while at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally - free spirits in free relation to each other - and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; noone says the individual. ~ Valerie Solanas

Even at that time the hope of leaving behind messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism bursting on Europe was an amiable illusion: the desperate letters stuck in the mud of the spirit of rejuvenesence and were worked up by a band of Noble Human-Beings and other riff-raff into highly artistic but inexpensive wall-adornments. Only since then has progress in communications really got into its stride. Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, more trusting, if possible, than even their contemporaries, but only for the dead God? ~ Theodor W. Adorno

My thoughts on the descent of our moral prejudices – for that is what this polemic is about – were first set out in a sketchy and provisional way in the collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, which I began to write in Sorrento during a winter that enabled me to pause, like a wanderer pauses, to take in the vast and dangerous land through which my mind had hitherto travelled. This was in the winter of 1876–7; the thoughts themselves go back further. They were mainly the same thoughts which I shall be taking up again in the present essays – let us hope that the long interval has done them good, that they have become riper, brighter, stronger and more perfect! The fact that I still stick to them today, and that they themselves in the meantime have stuck together increasingly firmly, even growing into one another and growing into one, makes me all the more blithely confident that from the first, they did not arise in me individually, randomly or sporadically but as stemming from a single root, from a fundamental will to knowledge deep inside me which took control, speaking more and more clearly and making ever clearer demands. And this is the only thing proper for a philosopher. We have no right to stand out individually: we must not either make mistakes or hit on the truth individually. Instead, our thoughts, values, every 'yes', 'no', 'if ' and 'but' grow from us with the same inevitability as fruits borne on the tree – all related and r ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Children are supposed to be free spirits and dream chasers, thinking of limitless opportunities. They are supposed to be filled with light that shines with happiness and joy that shouldn't be dimmed or filled with darkness and fear. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

It started when we were little kids.
Free spirits, but already
tormented by our own hands
given to us by our parents.
We got together and wrote on desks
and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains
and slipped through whatever
cracks we could find,
minds altered, we didn't falter
in portraving hysterical and
tragic characters in a smog
filled universe.
we loved the dirty city
and the journeys away from it.
We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,
chase tails round and round in downward spirals,
leaving trail of irretrievable,
vital life juice behind.
Still, the
brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz
was impenetrable
and we lived inside it
laughing with no clothes, and
everything experimental 'till
death was upon us.
In our face, mortality. ~ Anthony Kiedis

To keep our faces toward change, and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate, is strength undefeatable. ~ Helen Keller

And not only the world but humanity itself does need dragons"
"And why is that?" Chade demanded disdainfully.
"To keep the balance," the Fool replied. He glanced over me, and then past me, out of the window and his eyes went far and pensive. "Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as you please. Then, in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world's face."
"And I suppose dragons are better than we are because they don't do such things, because they simply take whatever they see. Free spirits, nature's creatures, possessing all the moral loftiness that comes from not being able to think."
The Fool shook his head, smiling. "No. Dragons are no better than humans. They are little different at all from men. They will hold up a mirror to humanity's selfishness. They will remind you that all your talk of owning this and claiming that is no more than the snarling of a chained dog or a sparrow's challenge song. The reality of those claims lasts but for the instant of its sounding. Name it as you will, claim it ~ Robin Hobb

The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth - that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. ~ Michel Foucault

Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a 'transvaluation of all values,' a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of 'true' and 'not true. The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of 'decent' people - he passed as 'an enemy of God,' as a scoffer at the truth, as one 'possessed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Free spirits are always condemned. Only sycophants are tolerated. ~ Marty Rubin

I feel like I belong to a different culture now. An older, nomadic one. I feel like I belong to the woods and stars and not at all to the houses. ~ Lucy Letcher

What do we free spirits want? We just want to think our own thoughts and feel our own feelings. Why should that be a problem for anyone else? ~ Marty Rubin

I'm a free spirit; more people should become free spirits. ~ Mark Roberts

Testimony is contingent on experience, that's why we're all free spirits ~ Phil Collins

We yearn to be fully immersed in the weightless world of our free spirit's true home, where our playful natures return to us with each sweep of our fantails, and protocol is silenced by a far more joyful call of the sea. ~ Margot Datz

Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies? ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

A free spirit's just an idiot who doesn't want to face reality. ~ Susan Minot

Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoiter the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Even free spirits had to the face the music sometime. ~ Kathleen Long

Fat Charlie blew his nose. "I never knew I had a brother," he said.
"I did," said Spider. "I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is."
"Not really."
"Things came up."
"What kind of things?"
"Things. They came up. That's what things do. They come up. I can't be expected to keep track of them all."
"Well, give me a f'rinstance."
Spider drank more wine. "Okay. The last time I decided that you and I should meet, I, well, I spent days planning it. Wanted it to go perfectly. I had to choose my wardrobe. Then I had to decide what I'd say to you when we met. I knew that the meeting of two brothers, well, it's the subject of epics, isn't it? I decided that the only way to treat it with the appropriate gravity would be to do it in verse. But what kind of verse? Am I going to rap it? Declaim it? I mean, I'm not going to greet you with a limerick. So. It had to be something dark, something powerful, rhythmic, epic. And then I had it. The perfect line: Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night. It says so much. I knew I'd be able to get everything in there - people dying in alleys, sweat and nightmares, the power of free spirits uncrushable. Everything was going to be there. And then I had to come up with a second line, and the whole thing completely fell apart. The best I could come up with was Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty got a fright."
Fat Charlie blinked. "Who exactly is Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty?"
"It's not any ~ Neil Gaiman

The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically - and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propu ~ Henry Miller

We are all free spirits. We must choose to practice freedom. ~ SARK

I went into geology because I like being outdoors, and because everybody in geology seemed, well, they all seemed like free spirits or renegades or something. You know, climbing mountains and hiking deserts and stuff. ~ Kathy B. Steele

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . .

The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . .

Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . .

So even if the libertarian principle of "an it harm none, do as thou wilt," is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn ~ Robert Locke

(Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.) ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When the Christian Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tally- word, that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their secretum, "Nothing is true, everything is allowed," - in sooth, that was freedom of thought, thereby was taking leave of the very belief in truth. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In appearance, the worldly life looks attractive, but once you enter into it, you can never become free. ~ Dada Bhagwan

You are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Look," Cam said irritably, "I'm here on behalf of Lord Ramsay's family. They want him back. God knows why. Give him to me, and I'll leave you in peace."
"If they want him," the butler said frostily, "let them send a proper servant. Not a filthy Gypsy."
Cam rubbed the corners of his eyes with his free hand and sighed. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Frankly, I'd rather not go through unnecessary exertion. All I ask is that you allow me five minutes to find the bastard and take him off your hands."
"Begone with you!"
After another foiled attempt to close the door, the butler reached for a silver bell on the hall table. A few seconds later, two burly footmen appeared.
"Show this vermin out at once," the butler commanded.
Cam removed his coat and tossed it onto one of the built-in benches lining the entrance hall.
The first footman charged him. In a few practiced movements, Cam landed a right cross on his jaw, flipped him, and sent him to a groaning heap on the floor.
The second footman approached Cam with considerably more caution than the first.
"Which is your dominant arm?" Cam asked.
The footman looked startled. "Why do you want to know?"
"I'd prefer to break the one you don't use as often."
The footman's eyes bulged, and he retreated, giving the butler a pleading glance.
The butler glared at Cam. "You have five minutes. Retrieve your master and go."
"Ramsay isn't my master," Cam ~ Lisa Kleypas

All of us have to ensure that our future generations lead a life of peace, dignity and mutual respect. We need to sow the seeds of a conflict-free world, and in this endeavour, Buddhism and Hinduism have a great contribution. ~ Narendra Modi

He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the ethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions. He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an organism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the individual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage of society it termed virtuous and those which were not it called vicious. Good and evil meant nothing more than that. Sin was a prejudice from which the free man should rid himself. Society had three arms in its ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Does anyone pray before they cut a tree? I haven't seen anyone do that yet in the timber industry. But my vision is that that day is coming. I have a vision of a world in which we relate to each other as souls - not as personalities - not as bodies and minds and capabilities to accomplish things in this domain of the five sense, but as immortal spirits learning together how to co-create this world. ~ Gary Zukav

Freedom of will is born from the neurons. And that freedom allows you to sometimes make even the worst decisions ever in your life. And by making the worst decision, you simply learn what would be the better decision in future. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I get letters from young people telling me that they're broke and download my albums for free. They ask me what I think about that. I now have a standard line. I tell them, 'I would rather be heard than paid.' ~ Henry Rollins

People always want to know what it feels like, so I'll tell you: there's a sting when you first slice, and then your heart speeds up when you see the blood, because you know you've done something you shouldn't have, and yet you've gotten away with it. Then you sort of go into a trance, because it's truly dazzling - that bright red line, like a highway route on a map that you want to follow to see where it leads. And - God - the sweet release, that's the best way I can describe it, kind of like a balloon that's tied to a little kid's hand, which somehow breaks free and floats into the sky. You just know that balloon is thinking, Ha, I don't belong to you after all; and at the same time, Do they have any idea how beautiful the view is from up here? And then the balloon remembers, after the fact, that it has a wicked fear of heights.
When reality kicks in, you grab some toilet paper or a paper towel (better than a washcloth, because the stains don't ever come out 100 percent) and you press hard against the cut. You can feel your embarrassment; it's a backbeat underneath your pulse. Whatever relief there was a minute ago congeals, like cold gravy, into a fist in the pit of your stomach. You literally make yourself sick, because you promised yourself last time would be the last time, and once again, you've let yourself down. So you hide the evidence of your weakness under layers of clothes long enough to cover the cuts, even if it's summertime and no one is wearing jeans or l ~ Jodi Picoult

Nothing is free. If you want it, you have to fight for it. ~ Ilona Andrews

In June 1991 he took the drastic step of asking a friend to post PGP on a Usenet bulletin board. PGP is just a piece of software, and so from the bulletin board it could be downloaded by anyone for free. PGP was now loose on the Internet. ~ Simon Singh

Even though Google may do very well, there will always be an alternative to what Google is doing, and people will always have the free choice ... because there's no way for us to prevent them from exercising that choice. That is one of the key aspects of why the Internet has been so successful. No technologies can dominate. ~ Eric Schmidt

Never marry a man unless you can sit with him reading a book and feel perfectly comfortable. If it makes you nervous to sit quietly with him while you read, feeling like you need to entertain him or provide conversation, then this would not be the person you should spend your life with. You should feel free to just be when you are with him. ~ Belle Blackburn

When I do get free time, I spend a lot of it at home with my family and my close friends and I think that's what keeps me happy, healthy, grounded, and totally in check. ~ Leighton Meester

I have no pleasure in any man who despises music. It is no invention of ours: it is a gift of God. I place it next to theology. Satan hates music: he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us. ~ Martin Luther

Even though men have very little interest in wearing women's clothes, this has not prevented a gigantic industry from arising, dedicated to satisfying women's desires in fashion. Industries which provide makeup, hair styling, nail polish, hair removal, and weight loss services are similarly "biased" in the direction of females: they disproportionately serve women. These phenomena would be very difficult to understand on the feminist model that female wants are ignored or deprecated in the male's favor. ~ Walter Block

Free driving is like an extreme sports version of snorkeling, ... That's about 50 feet deep. And basically what you do is you hold your breath and you wear a weight belt and go down as fast as possible and hold your breath for minutes at a time. ~ Jessica Alba

What about Sebastian?" Myst said. "Tell us anything."
"Anything? Well, what do I know?" Nix frowned. "What do I know? Oh! I know what I know!"
Nikolai paced impatiently, gesturing with his free hand for her to continue.
She shrugged. "Right now, your brother Sebastian is bellowing at someone outside a castle, demanding that they return to him, wishing it with everything that he is." She smiled, as if pleased with herself for seeing so much, then gave a quick clap. "Oh! And his skin just caught fire! ~ Kresley Cole

The pastor is saying something about how Charlie was a free spirit. He was and he wasn't. He was free because on the inside he was tied up in knots. He lived hard because on the inside he was dying. Charlie made inner conflict look delicious. ~ A.S. King

If a patient became sugar-free and blood sugar normal on a basal requirement diet, the caloric intake was gradually increased until sugar appeared in the urine. The tolerance was thus ascertained. ~ Frederick Banting

No amount of wealth or power can ever make you a rich as a free man. ~ Adwitiya Borah

The magical proposition of the gospel, once free from the clasps of fairy tale, was very adult to me, very gritty like something from Hemingway or Steinbeck, ~ Donald Miller

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something. ~ John Lennon

I bear witness of that day when loved ones whom we knew, to have disabilities in mortality, will stand before us glorified and grand; breathtakingly perfect in body and mind. What a thrilling moment that will be. I do not know whether we will be happier for ourselves, that we have witnessed such a miracle or happier for them that they are fully perfect and finally free at last. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

Why, why is this?
Think'st thou I'ld make a lie of jealousy,
To follow still the changes of the moon
With fresh suspicions? No; to be once in doubt
Is once to be resolved: exchange me for a goat,
When I shall turn the business of my soul
To such exsufflicate and blown surmises,
Matching thy inference. 'Tis not to make me jealous
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays and dances well;
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous:
Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw
The smallest fear or doubt of her revolt;
For she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago;
I'll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;
And on the proof, there is no more but this,
Away at once with love or jealousy! ~ William Shakespeare

Monopoly power is an illusion in any system in which free competition is allowed. ~ John Pugsley

He loved her, free parts and labor. But she broke down and died. ~ Rickie Lee Jones

Three blind hummingbirds hang in the air like jewels of iridescent scarlet and cobalt; then, one by one, they fade, all color leeched from them, and fall lifeless into the mists, to be eaten by rats.

Despair feels uncomfortable.

In her world there are so many windows. Each opening shows her an existence that's fallen to her - some only for moments, others for lifetimes. Able at this moment neither to savor them, nor to understand her own disquiet, she stares away from all the windows as she walks. Silent rats run unmindfully over her feet, invisible in the mist.

She misses him.

It is over three hundred years since last she and her brother were alone together. Like a flood, the memories come, and she is drowning in them. Against her will her chest heaves, and she begins to weep: deep, helpless, racking sobs...

No.

Despair places the cold metal barb of her hook onto the surface of her eye. And then she pushes, piercing cornea and lens, and ripping free the aqueous humor and vitreous humor to run like tears down her cheek, into her hand...

The pain distracts her, a little. But still, she remembers... ~ Neil Gaiman

Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. ~ Hannah Arendt

It is important to note that we don't think that sentimental items are bad or evil or that holding on to them is wrong. We don't. Rather, we think the pernicious nature of sentimental items – and overt sentimentality in general – is far more subtle. If you want to get rid of an item but the only reason you are holding on to it is for sentimental reasons – if it is weighing on you, if it's an anchor – then perhaps it's time to get rid of it, perhaps it is time to free yourself of the weight. ~ Joshua Fields Millburn