Honore de Balzac Quotes

The free, self-determining, self-developing soul may not walk its own path, however innocently, but must fit into the scheme and pattern …

Freedom is the right to choose the habits that bind you.

See, it's no in between: you're either free or you're a slave.

I don't want to feel like people are imposing limits upon you.

...to make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.

Conformity is painful. You know, it's too tight. Conformity leads to rebellion. So a desire for happiness is in direct conflict with a desire for freedom.

What we know to be true is that comfort isn't always freedom. People confuse the two.

Freedom is the power to choose our own chains.

You can cage the songbird, but you can't make her sing. And you can trap the free bird, but you'll have to clip her wings.

The reason why I hated school so intensely [was that] it interfered with my freedom.

Fashion is an imposition, a reign on freedom.

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Fantastic tyrant of the amorous heart. How hard thy yoke, how cruel thy dart. Those escape your anger who refuse your sway, and those are punished most, who most obey.

I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

I don't think of myself as being tied.

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

I don't want to live in a nanny state where people are telling me where I can go and what I can do.

You might as well expect rivers to run backwards as any man born free to be contented penned up.

When I don't feel free and can't do what I want I just react. I go against it.

I'm phobic about the idea of being constrained.