Inner Confinement Quotes

We are all prisoners of our thoughts.

Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.

Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul.

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.

Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

The Loneliness One dare not sound -- And would as soon surmise AS in its Grave go plumbing To ascertain the size -- The Loneliness whose worst alarm Is lest itself should see -- And perish from before itself For just a scrutiny -- The Horror not to be surveyed -- But skirted in the Dark -- With Consciousness suspended -- And Being under Lock -- I fear me this -- is Loneliness -- The Maker of the soul Its Caverns and its Corridors Illuminate -- or seal

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

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 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 all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul.

Fear is a pair of handcuffs on your soul.

In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is.

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

In the cocoon, there is no idea of light at all, until we experience some longing for openness, some longing for something other than the smell of our own sweat. When we examine that comfortable darkness - look at it, smell it, feel it - we find it is claustrophobic.

We are all prisoners at one time or another in our lives, prisoners to ourselves or to the expectations of those around us. It is a burden that all people endure, that all people despise, and that few people ever learn to escape.

That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.

It's okay to feel the need for protection if there is a real external threat. But to feel protective from the inside, it's a kind of jail: you get so protective that you cannot get out of the box.