Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

We do not believe in having happiness imposed upon us.

No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.

Happiness has to be installed in each person as a state of affairs completely cut off from the process that brought it about and, in particular, from the real situation. Man has to be affected with happiness. It is a tonality given to him. Contradiction: if one does take care to give him happiness, it is because he is a free creature--but in order to give it to him, one turns him into an object.

I am so happy that I didn't have children. Well, you know, because I've had freedom.

I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.

The will of man is his happiness.

I've never had anything but the freedom to do what I wanted just as long as it made me happy.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

My ambition is to enjoy my life and to do exactly what I want to do. And I'll do that. I will be free.

I am ready to do everything for the people, but nothing under compulsion by the people.

Above all, we know that although Americans can be led to make great sacrifices, they do not like to be driven.

It would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.

In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed.

It is never easy to cleanly distinguish freedom and duty, consent and bondage, choice and compulsion.

You can't push and force people to do what they don't want to do.

Whoever is just willingly and without compulsion will not lack happiness; he will never be utterly destroyed.

Happiness is not by chance, but by choice.

Each of us deserves the freedom to pursue our own version of happiness. No one deserves to be bullied.

Happiness is doing it rotten your own way.

Happiness is so awfully complicated, but freedom isn't. You're either tied down or you're not.

The man who does something under orders is not unhappy; he is unhappy who does something against his will.

This right to life, this right to liberty, and this right to pursue one's happiness is unabashedly individualistic, without in the slightest denying at the same time our thoroughly social nature. It's only that our social relations, while vital to us all, must be chosen - that is what makes the crucial difference.

What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.

We are given an autonomy and the real autonomy... and God would much rather we went freely to hell than compel us to go to heaven.

I do believe in choice, the freedom of choice and carving out your own happiness.