Reference Quote

Shuffle
Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.

Similar Quotes

Quote search results. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.

La libertad es la posibilidad del aislamiento. Eres libre si puedes alejarte de los hombres, sin que te obligue a buscarlos la necesidad de dinero, o la necesidad gregaria, o el amor, o la gloria, o la curiosidad, que no puede encontrar alimento en el silencio y la soledad. Si te resulta imposible vivir solo, has nacido esclavo. Puedes tener toda la grandeza de espíritu, toda la grandeza del alma: eres un esclavo noble o un siervo inteligente: no eres libre. Y la tragedia no es cosa tuya, porque la tragedia de haber nacido así no es cosa tuya, sino solamente del Destino. Ay de ti, no obstante, si la opresión de la vida, ella misma te obliga a ser esclavo. Ay de ti si, habiendo nacido libre, capaz de bastarte y aislarte, la penuria te obliga a convivir. Ésa sí es tu tragedia y la que llevas contigo.

Go Premium

Support Quotewise while enjoying an ad-free experience and premium features.

View Plans
Try QuoteGPT

Chat naturally about what you need. Each answer links back to real quotes with citations.

Be it well understood, I am free by compulsion, whether I wish to be or not. Freedom is not an activity pursued by an entity that, apart from and previous to such pursuit, is already possessed of a fixed being. To be free means to be lacking in constitutive identity, not to have subscribed to a determined being, to be able to be other than what one was, to be unable to install oneself once and for all in any given being. The only attribute of the fixed, stable being in the free being is this constitutive instability.

Share Your Favorite Quotes

Know a quote that's missing? Help grow our collection.

To be free is to not merely cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one's existence; food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one's environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life.

Free is the person who lives as he wishes and cannot be coerced, impeded or compelled, whose impulses cannot be thwarted, who always gets what he desires and never has to experience what he would rather avoid.

To be free is often to be lonely.

Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free — and how much more the spirit who has become free — spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior. —

PREMIUM FEATURE
Advanced Search Filters

Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.

To be free ... means to be acknowledged and treated as such by all his fellowmen. The liberty of every individual is only the reflection of his own humanity, or his human right through the conscience of all free men, his brothers and his equals. (...) I am not myself free or human until or unless I recognize the freedom and humanity of all my fellowmen.

Loading more quotes...

Loading...