The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

39. Bondage and Liberation are mere notions in the mind: they cease when he who is bound is inquired into and realized.

Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.

Desire, ignorance, and inequality — this is the trinity of bondage.

If you think that you are bound, you remain bound; you make your own bondage. If you know that you are free, you are free this moment. This is knowledge, knowledge of freedom. Freedom is the goal of all nature.

"What makes you so certain?"
"But I am not certain," I told him. "Nothing is certain. You want certainty?"
"Yes!"
"Then you want death."

The bondage we are born into is the bondage we cannot see. Verily, freedom is little more than the ignorance of tyranny. Live long enough, and you will see: Men resent not the whip so much as the hand that wields it.

If you use any external activity to create an inner situation, you naturally get enslaved to that external activity, and that becomes the condition for your joy. That's the basis of your slavery and bondage; unless you change that, you will never know joy as a way of being.

Men who are not free always idealize their bondage.

Two fears alternate in marriage, of loneliness and of bondage. The dread of loneliness being keener than the fear of bondage, we get married. For one person who fears being thus tied there are four who dread being set free. Yet the love of liberty is a noble passion and one to which most married people secretly aspire, — in moments when they are not neurotically dependent — but by then it is too late; the ox does not become a bull, not the hen a falcon.

The fear of loneliness can be overcome, for it springs from weakness; human beings are intended to be free, and to be free is to be lonely, but the fear of bondage is the apprehension of a real danger, and so I find it all the more pathetic to watch young men and beautiful girls taking refuge in marriage from an imaginary danger, a sad loss to their friends ad a sore trial to each other. First love is the one most worth having, yet the best marriage is often the second, for we should marry only when the desire for freedom be spent; not till then does a man know whether he is the kind who can settle down. The most tragic breakings-up are of those couples who have married young and who have enjoyed seven years of happiness, after which the banked fires of passion and independence explode — and without knowing why, for they still love each other, they set about accomplishing their common destruction.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.