Michel de Montaigne Quotes

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

No bird in a cage ever speaks. What is there to say? The sky is everywhere, churning above its head, blue and endless, calling out to it. But the caged bird can't answer anything except 'I cannot'.

In prison, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

I'm like a caged animal sometimes. Let me yearn to breathe free.

For why trap what is already trapped? It is only in flight that we know the freedom of the bird

Caged birds accept each other, but flight is what they long for.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill, of things unknown, but longed for still, and his tune is heard on the distant hill, for the caged bird sings of freedom.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.

Most marriages recognize this paradox: Passion destroys passion; we want what puts an end to wanting what we want.

It's awfully easy to be in love in jail.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.

So I departed and was free from imprisonment.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

You'll never know how sweet freedom can be unless you've lost it for eight and a half years.

There is not a man among them who would not leave if they believed they could make their escape … Liberty is sweet.

I never thought I would see the outside of Chicago.

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.

That's the only place in all the lands we've ever heard of that we don't want to see any closer; and that's the one place we're trying to get to! And that's just where we can't get, nohow.

Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free!!

Free as air; that's what they say- "free as air". Now they bring me my air in an iron barrel.