Philip Roth Quotes

Teach yourself freedom with the same zeal that the world has taught you limits.

It takes courage to break down the walls that keep you away from really living your life.

For some people, life is the process of knocking through walls to get out. For others, it is the building of walls.

Problems, obstacles, and challenges can either become the markers of our limits and limitations, or they can become the springboard into a whole new world.

Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.

I say: liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. Consequently, do not tire yourself with toiling at the limits of others; enough if you tear down yours. He who overturns one of his limits may have shown others the way and the means; the overturning of their limits remains their affair.

This world and life of ours are filled with inequalities. The worst possible use to make of this fact, however, is to allow resentments to possess us. All of us have imagined limitations, but we have also the privilege of pushing them aside, and spreading our lives out! We never know any of our limitations until we put ourselves to the test. There are always "growing pains" working within us.

It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.

When meditation makes you realize that you have so many limitations of your own and they are all created by you, the longing to break them will come.

Don't accept the limitations of other people who claim things are 'unchangeable'. If it's written in stone, bring your hammer and chisel.

All I ever wanted was a world without maps.

The sad thing is that, even though we know our lives aren't working in certain areas, we are still afraid to change. We are locked into our comfort zone, no matter how self-destructive it may be. Yet, the only way to get out of our comfort zone and to be free of our problems and limitations is to get uncomfortable.

Everything has boundaries. the same holds true with thought. you shouldn't fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. that's what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. what's really important in life is always the things that are secondary.

Break the Shell”: “Child, it’s time to break the shell Life’s gonna hurt but it’s meant to be felt You cannot touch the sky from inside yourself You cannot fly until you break the shell.

History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

I removed the window [tattoo] because, while I used to spend all my time looking out through windows wishing to be outside, I now live there all the time.

Things change when you learn to loosen your grip. I think one way and the future is desperate. I think another way everything is in sight. Trees bend so branches don't have to break. We mend the wounds of our last mistake... I live one way holding onto the fence post. I live another way sliding off into space. Each life is loosely assembled... Birds swim, fish do fly. Proud man begins to cry. Birds swim, fish do fly. Things change, so why can't I?

My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.

Escape is not about moving from one place to another. It's about becoming more.

Stand up and walk out of your history

But a risk-free life wasn't much of a life, really, and if she was going to change, she might as well start now.

Your courage draws people out of complacency into their destiny.

A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let... lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.

Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.