Freedom and slavery are mental states.
The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
True meditation gives us, as it were, wings for flight to a higher realm and thus detaches us from terrestrial fetters.
We should cast aside all childish games that fetter and exhaust body, speech and mind. Stretching out in inconceivable nonaction, in the unstructured matrix, the actuality of emptiness, where the natural perfection of reality lies, we should gaze at the uncontrived sameness of every experience, all conditioning and ambition resolved with finality.
I don't have opinions. Only if it is necessary for a particular action, I make a judgment. Opinions are fetters for your intelligence.
Whoever makes love grow boundless, and sets his mind for seeing the end of birth, his fetters are worn thin. If he loves even a single being, Good will follow. But the Noble One with compassionate heart for all mankind, generates abounding good.
When a man is stimulated by his own thoughts, full of desire and dwelling on what is attractive, his craving increases even more. He is making the fetter even stronger. But he who takes pleasure in stilling his thoughts, practising the contemplation of what is repulsive, and remaining recollected, now he will make an end of craving, he will snap the bonds of Mara. His aim is accomplished, he is without fear, rid of craving and without stain. He has removed the arrows of changing existence. This is his last body.
The wise say that it is not an iron, wooden or fiber fetter which is a strong one, but the besotted hankering after trinkets, children and wives, that, say the wise, is the strong fetter. It drags one down, and loose as it feels, it is hard to break. Breaking this fetter, people renounce the world, free from longing and abandoning sensuality.
Your freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride, Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide. Do not extort thy reasons from this clause, For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause But rather reason thus with reason fetter, Love sought is good, but given unsought better.
Poetry fettered fetters the human race.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.
Awake! thou that sleepest, arise from the dead! The Lord still lives today. His power has never abated. His Word has never changed. The things He did in Bible days, He still lives to do today. Not a burden is there He cannot bear nor a fetter He cannot break.
How strange now, looks the life he makes us lead; So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!
I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline.
When a slave begins to take pride in his fetters and hugs them like precious ornaments, the triumph of the slave-owner is complete.
Neither the chains of dictatorship nor the fetters of oppression can keep down the forces of freedom for long.
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
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