Echoes

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided.

He who is brave is free.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.

We place the happy life in the security of the mind and in freedom from all obligations.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

No man is free who is not master of himself.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Liberty is never out of bounds or off limits; it spreads wherever it can capture the imagination of men.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

If you're afraid — don't do it. If you're doing it — don't be afraid.

It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.