Henry David Thoreau Quotes

We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.

Birds are settling down for the night, singing lullabies to their young.

Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird

You can cage the songbird, but you can't make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you'll have to clip her wings.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation." "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me.

I have never in my life walked with a harness. The weight of the tether, makes it feel like I'm dragging an anchor behind me.

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.

Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.

300 was the biggest hurdle. They tried to hold us against our will.

What we know to be true is that comfort isn't always freedom. People confuse the two.

No man loveth his fetters, be they made of gold.

You can't be a free spirit in a place that feels like it was built on lockdown.

A bird in a cage is not half a bird.

I know why the caged bird sings.

A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage.

A caged canary is safe but not free.

For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird

A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back.

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?