The desire to be loved is the last illusion. Give it up and you will be free.
John von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!
I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.
In the end they'll judge me anyway, so whatever.
Art is never decoration, embellishment; instead, it is work of enlightenment. Art, in other words, is a technique for acquiring liberty.
There are stories we take on from our culture, and there are stories based on our own personal history. Some of those stories lock us in limiting beliefs and lead to suffering, and there are others that can move us toward freedom.
Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.
Forgiving is, first of all, a way of helping yourself to get free of the unfair pain somebody caused you.
To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.
Man is free at the instant he wants to be.
I believe the highest aspiration of man should be individual freedom and the development of the individual.
You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.
I now stop feeling guilty. I let myself out of that prison.
Forgiving someone does not mean you condone their behavior. The act of forgiveness takes place in your own mind. It really has nothing to do with the other person. The reality of true forgiveness lies in setting ourselves free from holding on to the pain. It is simply an act of releasing yourself from the negative energy.
You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds. Have no fear for atomic energy, 'Cause none of them can stop the time.
No one, and no mind, was ever emancipated by merely being left alone.
The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.
My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.
Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, 'You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me.' It's saying, 'You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.
When I look at my life, I see that I wanted to be free of the physical plane, the psychological plane, and when I got free of those I didn't want to go anywhere near them.
True freedom is an inward state of being. Once it is attained, no situation in the world can bind one or limit one's freedom.
We gain internal freedom through external actions.
