Too many people think freedom is the ability to do anything you want, instead of the discipline to not be a slave to your compulsions.
Saved by alex and
Too many people think freedom is the ability to do anything you want, instead of the discipline to not be a slave to your compulsions.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawin... See more
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
I think freedom, ideally, is being able to choose your responsibilities. Not not having any responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.
– Toni Morrison
“Freedom,” according to Jean-Paul Sartre, “is what you do with what’s been done to you.” This is true at the individual level — say, someone climbing their way out of a traumatic childhood into full adulthood — as well as at the collective level — think, for example, of the generations-long liberation struggle of Black people in America.
Andrew Boyd • I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor
‘I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It is knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth and then simply doing it.’
⁃ Natalie Goldberg, ‘Writing Down The Bones’
the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
Steven Pressfield • The War of Art
