In every cry of every man, In every infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse
I should say I am far more cleverer than any of the people who put me here. As a matter of fact, I could leave any time I wanted. It's only a doll house after all. Anyway, I don't mind. I like dolls. Particularly the live ones.
Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind -- is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.
We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.
Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.
She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.
Someone once said that under the bell jar of compliance, the only thing that blooms is rage.
And men, whose reason long was blind, From cells of madness unconfined, Oft lose whole years of darker mind.
With my childhood and growing up in a very free place where my parents were artists and always encouraging me to explore, you wouldn't think I was locked up in my own mind, but I was.
And I have the others in me. Even when I’m far away from them, I am forced to live with them. Even when I’m all alone, crowds surround me. I have no place to flee to, unless I were to flee from myself.
Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.
I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.
They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many times in my life, I was there myself.
Everybody who works under any system feels confined. It is a natural reaction. You are confined to a certain extent. You are confined if you work in a bank, if you paint. You are confined, in a sense, to your art - the enclosure of your mind. Everybody should break out.
[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.
I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.
Many of us are in are in our own prisons that aren't made of iron bars.
Freedom is an elusive concept. Some men hold themselves prisoner even when they have the power to do as they please and go where they choose, while others are free in their hearts, even as shackles restrain them.
you parrot negative things and squawk about the things you don't love, you are literally jailing yourself, like a parrot in a cage. Every time you talk about what you don't love, you are adding another bar to the cage and you are locking yourself away from all the good.
They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.
The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is.
You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
