Free Prisoner Quotes & Sayings

There comes a time in our life when we make ourselves a prisoner; we have to do everything possible to break ourselves free". — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Tonight I feel like a prisoner on fire, waiting desperately ... denied, sentenced forever more. Only your love can set me free. — Michael Bolton

Heat stole over her for she suspected he might be trying to charm her, and she was not immune. 'Twould be too easy to fall under his spell. "I've already given you food. You are mighty demanding for a prisoner."
A grin quirked his lips. "There is something I want from you after I'm free." She was afraid to ask, but she had to know. "And what is that?"
"A kiss. — Vonda Sinclair

I wrote my book to free myself from it, not to be its prisoner. — Elena Ferrante

The will of man without the grace of God is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil since it cannot turn itself to good. — Martin Luther

At twenty your choices are almost unlimited. At fifty you're a prisoner of past decisions. At seventy you have no free will left at all. — Helen McCloy

Freedom is an elusive concept. Some men hold themselves prisoner even when they have the power to do as they please and go where they choose, while others are free in their hearts, even as shackles restrain them. — Brian Herbert

Alp Arslan: "What would you do if I was brought before you as a prisoner?"
Romanos: "Perhaps I'd kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople."
Alp Arslan: "My punishment is far heavier. I forgive you, and set you free. — Alp Arslan

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. — Thomas Merton

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective. — Aldous Huxley

You have the illusion of free will, but, in fact, that illusion comes about because you don't know the future. Because you are a prisoner of the present, forever locked in transition, between the past and the future. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination. — Byung-Chul Han

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. "They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday," Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they'll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor's hand felt like (see Living in Darkness, Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor's hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free. — Marisha Pessl

To forgive, one must love and be loved. Only those who forgive can be free. Whoever forgives is a prisoner no more. — Jan-Philipp Sendker

Par for the course when it comes to the Branch. They're always holding people prisoner, and people are always trying to break free. — Jennifer Rush

Free-will without God's grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good. Martin Luther — R.C. Sproul

Music eliminates my gravity. When I'm singing, I'm a ravenous pterodactyl. I'm alive and free and hungry, and I know who I am. But the flood is coming; it's weighing me down, making me prisoner to my loneliness and pain.
-character Joanna (Broken) — J. Matthew Nespoli

I believe all suffering contains at least the opportunity for good," came his response, "but not everyone actualizes that potential. Not all of us learn and benefit from suffering; that's where free will comes in. One prisoner in a concentration camp will react quite differently from another, because of the choice each one makes to respond to the environment. — Lee Strobel

You can never want too much. That's how they silence us," I said. "They told us we were lucky to be in the penal colony instead of the aether. Lucky to be murdered with NiteKind, not the noose. Lucky to be alive, even if we weren't free. They told us to stop wanting more than what they gave us, because what they gave us was more than we deserved." I picked up my jacket. "You're not a prisoner any more, Arcturus." Warden looked at me in silence. I left him in that ruined hall with the music echoing above him. — Samantha Shannon

Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy. — Nizar Qabbani

The only way to heal the pain which will not heal itself is to forgive the person who hurt you. Forgiveness heals the memory's vision ... You set a prisoner free, but you discover the real prisoner was yourself. — Lewis B. Smedes

Once I was a prisoner lost inside myself with the world surrounding me, wandering through the misery, but now I am free. Free to love, free to laugh, free to soar, free to shine, free to give. — Mariah Carey

When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself. — Lewis B. Smedes

A man in chains need not be a slave. If he has pride and self-respect he is a free man though a prisoner, and a constant danger to his jailers. Conversely, a slave who escapes is not a free man, but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A slave is one who accepts the identity ascribed to him by a master: You are an inferior and unworthy person and so will remain, and therefore must serve me with obedience and humility. — Allen Wheelis

I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?" ... "Despair," said Finney. "They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why?" "You were free." "I was free. Milton was right ... the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now. — Louise Penny

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo. — Michael Foley

Had I ever truly been free? Though I wasn't shipped off to different countries did that make me any less of a prisoner? — Kay Harding

I cured myself of shyness when it finally occurred to me that people didn't think about me half as much as I gave them credit for. The truth was, nobody gave a damn. Like most teenagers, I was far too self-centered. When I stopped being prisoner to what I worried was others' opinions of me, I became more confident and free. — Lucille Ball

He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay, he is even more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists, he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature's laws, why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to come, though afterwards he can come as he please. His power ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. — Bram Stoker

I am not a number; I am a free man. — Patrick McGoohan

Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon. — Nicolas Gomez Davila

Nailed to the beloved body like a slave to a cross, I have learned some secrets of life which are now dimmed in my memory by the operation of the same law which ordains that the convalescent, once cured, ceases to understand the mysterious truths laid bare by illness, and that the prisoner, set free, forgets his torture, or the conqueror, his triumph passed, forgets his glory. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Just one word, infused with naked desperation; half prayer, half enchantment. It felt like a freezing charm on her soul making her his prisoner, yet setting her free all at once. — Genevieve Dewey

Sade is still a prisoner when he dies, but this time in a lunatic asylum,acting plays on an improvised stage with other lunatics. A derisory equivalent of the satisfaction that the order of the world failed to give him was provided for him by dreams and by creative activity. The writer,
of course, has no need to refuse himself anything. For him, at least, boundaries disappear and desire can
be allowed free rein. In this respect Sade is the perfect man of letters. He created a fable in order to give
himself the illusion of existing. — Albert Camus

Nobody's truly free. Everyone is prisoner to a secret, a sin, a lie. It wasn't by accident that, in the Star Spangled Banner, Francis Scott Key set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could attain it. — J. Matthew Nespoli

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was yourself. — Diane Moody

I refuse to stay a prisoner to my body. I am going to free myself. — Leigh Hershkovich

It breaks my heart. Better than your words, your eye tells me all your peril.
You are not yet free, you still search for freedom. Your search has fatigued you and made you too wakeful.
You long for the open heights, your soul thirsts for the stars. But your bad instincts too thirst for freedom.
Your fierce dogs long for freedom; they bark for joy in their cellar when your spirit aspires to break open all prisons.
To me you are still a prisoner who imagines freedom: ah, such prisoners of the soul become clever, but also deceitful and base. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. — Dalai Lama XIV

Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to 'a moral choice.' His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free. — John Pilger

Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set someone free and realising you were the prisoner! — Max Lucado

I have skipped from style to style from film to film, and I love doing that because it's given me the ability to free myself from the past. Perhaps one of the worst feelings that I can have is the feeling that I'm locked in, like a prisoner of myself, which is something we all feel at some point in our lives. So part of making those stylistic jumps is just to free myself up-to get away from the old or the old Oliver Stone. — Oliver Stone

Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts. — Nelson Mandela

So I wait for the day when I'll hear the key as it turns in the lock And the guard will say to me, Oh my patient prisoner you waited for this day and finally, you are free! You are free! You are free! — Conor Oberst

Had I been given The [Pentagon] Papers themselves that early, I would probably have become a prisoner of them - as it was, I had a good sense of the bureaucratic history [in them] as related by an expert, but I was also free to do several hundred interviews, not merely to flesh out the bureaucratic history, but to balance the pure paper history with a human history, and to relate secret decisions as they were not always set down on paper. — David Halberstam

The best power of all is to be free, but Obama is not a free person. He is a prisoner of a military system. He talked about closing Guantanamo and ending the war in Iraq. Now he's taken on another war. What's happening? — Adolfo Perez Esquivel

I've never been free in my whole life. Inside I've always chased myself. I've become intolerable to myself. I live in a lacerating duality. I'm seemingly free, but I'm a prisoner inside of me. — Clarice Lispector

If one has never known freedom, it is easy to be blind to the gridirons composing one's cell. — Nenia Campbell

The same sun that rises over castles and welcomes the day
Spills over buildings into the streets where orphans play
And only You can see the good in broken things
You took my heart of stone, and You made it home
And set this prisoner free — Bethany Dillon

This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

I was a prisoner, but I always felt free because I was not frightened So for me real freedom is freedom from fear. — Aung San Suu Kyi

This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom.
Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet. — W. Somerset Maugham

I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. — Nelson Mandela

Righteous passion is an innocent prisoner
until the day you set it free.
Sinful passion is a guilty prisoner;
lock it up and throw away the key. — Matshona Dhliwayo

At the end of the day, when the sun falls a willing prisoner of the night ... and humans, males and females alike, become submitted to the mistress of the dark, my mind begins to wander and wonder. Looking upwards at a blank slate of concrete, the psyque expresses freely what my subconscious is afraid to give free rein. And there and then, between the play of reality and dreamland, I find my place. I find myself. — Eiry Nieves

For so many years I lived in constant terror of myself. Doubt had married my fear and moved into my mind, where it built castles and ruled kingdoms and reigned over me, bowing my will to its whispers until I was little more than an acquiescing peon, too terrified to disobey, too terrified to disagree. I had been shackled, a prisoner in my own mind.
But finally, finally, I have learned to break free. — Tahereh Mafi

"That first day when we met, when I gave you my estimate for the deck project and you wouldn't shake my hand ... " I laced my fingers with hers. "There was something sad and lonely in your eyes. I knew all about your reputation, your nickname the Ice Queen, but that wasn't what I saw that day. When I looked into your blue eyes, I saw a princess locked away in a tower, a prisoner. I wanted to set you free. — Lisa Kessler

A conversation between Adso and William -
You understand, Adso, I must believe that my proposition works, because I learned it by experience; but to believe it I must assume there are universal laws. Yet I cannot speak of them, because the very concept that universal laws and an established order exist would imply that God is their prisoner, whereas God is something absolutely free, so that if He wanted, with a single act of His will He could make the world different."
"And so, if I understand you correctly, you act, and you know why you act, but you don't know know why you know that you know what you do?"
I must say with pride that William gave me a look of admiration. "Perhaps that's it. In any case, this tells you why I feel so uncertain of my truth, even if I believe in it. — Umberto Eco

Is it possible that my walls are specifically erected and intentionally reinforced out of the fear that God calls me to an existence without walls? And if this is so, do I realize that I am the warden of prison that I created in which I myself am the prisoner? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Prison service vans that travel 90 miles to take a prisoner 90 yards; paedophiles free to leer at children in the very parks where they have committed horrific crimes. — Trevor Phillips

Terrorism is not a matter that can be left to law enforcement, with its deliberative process, built-in delays, and safeguards that may let the prisoner go free on procedural grounds. — George P. Shultz

Freedom of mind is the real freedom.
A person whose mind is not free though he may not be in chains, is a slave, not a free man.
One whose mind is not free, though he may not be in prison, is a prisoner and not a free man.
One whose mind is not free though alive, is no better than dead.
Freedom of mind is the proof of one's existence. — B.R. Ambedkar

And this may teach us the extreme value of searching the Scriptures. There may be a promise in the Word which would exactly fit your case, but you may not know of it, and therefore you miss its comfort. You are like prisoners in a dungeon, and there may be one key in the bunch which would unlock the door, and you might be free; but if you will not look for it, you may remain a prisoner still, though liberty is so near at hand. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

You are as free as a prisoner in an open air prison — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Forgive to set yourself free; love to set the prisoner free. — Debasish Mridha

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free. — Francisco Jimenez

Even as it clouds our corporeal vision, intoxication clarifies our spiritual vision. The mind, set free from the heavy bondage of the body, flees away like a prisoner whose guard has fallen asleep, leaving the keys at the prison gate. — Gerard De Nerval

Forgiveness is setting the prisoner free, only to find out that the prisoner was me. — Corrie Ten Boom

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. — Joseph Conrad

There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell. He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room's only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so, he can see a bit of bright sunlight barely visible between the uppermost bars. This light is his only hope. He will not risk losing it. And so he continues to staring toward that bit of light, holding tightly to the bars. So committed is his effort not to lose sight of that glimmer of life-giving light, that it never occurs to him to let go and explore the darkness of the rest of the cell. So it is that he never discovers that the door at the other end of the cell is open, that he is free. He has always been free to walk out into the brightness of the day, if only he would let go. (192) — Sheldon B. Kopp

Spy

Though at the moment I am a prisoner, my spirit remains free. While everyone is fighting a never-ending battle to see who will survive amid so much bloodshed, I don't need to fight anymore, only wait for people I've never met to decide who I am. — Paulo Coelho

when you run from truth , lie create a artificial beautiful cage around you and you start live like prisoner who just think i am free but its also lie. — Mohammed Zaki Ansari

We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts. — Mary Wortley Montagu

I hate the very noise of troublous man
Who did and does me all the harm he can.
Free from the world I would a prisoner be
And my own shadow all my company. — John Clare

Imprisoned peace sets the war free — Munia Khan

The shadow demons (fears) you've been avoiding keep you stuck in a rut, a prisoner in your own life - it's time to break free and shine! — Sharon Kirstin

I hope that my feet will carry me to a place where binding memories don't exist, where I can be free of my past. But then again, running away, or wanting to escape, won't solve a thing. It's not my past that holds me prisoner. It's my fucking heart. — Mia Asher

A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological 'disconnectors', even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this 'non-corporal' penality. The — Michel Foucault

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is? — George Bernard Shaw

The first and often only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness ... When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us. — Lewis B. Smedes

When you forgive, the prisoner you set free is yourself. — Helen Klein Ross

Memories were a powerful thing. They could at once set you free or take you prisoner, hold your entire life captive. I — L. H. Cosway

Dear God, Please teach me to forgive myself and others. Remove the walls that keep love out, behind which I am a prisoner. Heal my guilt and remove my anger, that I might be reborn. Make gentle my heart and strong my spirit and show me how to love. Please show me how to honor myself. Please teach me how to listen to myself.
Please program my mind to know itself, that I might at last be free. Teach me to appreciate your spirit that lives within me. Show me how to be good to myself, that I might know more fully the goodness of life. Amen — Marianne Williamson

As I travel through my country, people often ask me how it feels to have been imprisoned in my home -first for six years, then for 19 months. How could I stand the separation from family and friends? It is ironic, I say, that in an authoritarian state it is only the prisoner of conscience who is genuinely free. Yes, we have given up our right to a normal life. But we have stayed true to that most precious part of our humanity-our conscience. — Aung San Suu Kyi

Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free. — Stephen King

Forgiveness sets the prisoner free. And realizing that prisoner was you. That's what forgiveness does. It sets you free. — Victoria Osteen

The deep problem facing everyone is how to break free when being a prisoner is the only comfortable way you know how to live. — Deepak Chopra

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Who can be born again in Christ but him who has forgiven everyone he sees or thinks of or imagines? Who could be set free while he imprisons anyone? A jailer is not free, for he is bound together with his prisoner. He must be sure that he does not escape, and so he spends his time in keeping watch on him. The bars that limit him become the world in which his jailer lives, along with him. And it is on his freedom that the way to liberty depends for both of them. Therefore, hold no one prisoner. Release instead of bind, for thus are you made free. The way is simple. Every time you feel a stab of anger, realize you hold a sword above your head. And it will fall or be averted as you choose to be condemned or free. Thus does each one who seems to tempt you to be angry represent your savior from the prison house of death. And so you owe him thanks instead of pain. — Foundation For Inner Peace

Sometimes I think you're still a prisoner. You're not free of this place in your head, Nathan. And you're definitely not free of those people. They haunt you. — Sally Green

Don't become a prisoner of your own reality, set yourself free by creating a life worth living. — Steven Redhead

No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn