No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Oh, this base heart of ours! Hath it not enough tinder in it to set on fire the course of nature? If a spark do but fall into it, any one of our members left to itself would dishonour Christ, deny the Lord that bought us, and turn back into perdition.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Each time we cooperate with God, we take one more giant step forward. Because when God asks us to change, it means that He always has something better to give us – more freedom, greater joy, and greater blessings.

During my first years in the Sierra, I was ever calling on everybody within reach to admire them, but I found no one half warm enough until Emerson came. I had read his essays, and felt sure that of all men he would best interpret the sayings of these noble mountains and trees. Nor was my faith weakened when I met him in Yosemite.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.

You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.

Freedom lies in being bold.

O wise man! Give your wealth only to the worthy and never to others. The water of the sea received by the clouds is always sweet.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.

Man is by nature a political animal.

I felt extremely uncomfortable as the focal point, in the spotlight. I really like the behind the scenes role, because all my freedom is there.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches.

Let us ask ourselves, ‚What kind of people do we think we are?‘ And let us answer, ‚Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.‘

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

Man is not free unless government is limited.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Money won’t create success, the freedom to make it will.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

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

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

To be admitted to Nature’s hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

I didn’t go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.

Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.

I owe the best of myself to geology, but everything it has taught me tends to turn me away from dead things.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

We don’t hide our space program. We don’t keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.

Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. Heaven knows that John the Baptist was not more eager to get all his fellow sinners into the Jordan than I to baptize all of mine in the beauty of God’s mountains.

We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and Freedom will prevail.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

We are not to give credit to the many, who say that none ought to be educated but the free; but rather to the philosophers, who say that the well-educated alone are free.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves.

The Israelites‘ slavery in Egypt is the equivalent of our slavery to sin. God sent Moses to deliver them from bondage, and He sent Jesus Christ to set us free.