Jailer Quotes & Sayings

I never said you were supposed to be a jailer, i only said a normal person would have questioned why someone would create a decoy nun and then crawl out the window. — Janette Rallison

It's a lie that the body is a prison! It's the mind, I tell you! - always the cold, strong mind that's jailer. — Josephine W. Johnson

Whatever you hold in contempt is your jailer. — Brendan Behan

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free. — James Russell Lowell

He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence. — Gilbert Highet

Fear is a prison where you are the jailer. Free yourself! — Bryant McGill

Let fear be a counselor and not a jailer. — Tony Robbins

Yes, fear was the kind of prison where you made yourself the inmate and the jailer. — A.J. Sand

Typical is the murderer of thought, the defiler of ideas, the jailer of genius. Typical is the synapse you've already burned into that genius brain of yours, and typical leads right to the lizard brain. The lizard brain wants us all to be the same. A flock of geese. A herd of cattle. Middle management. The lizard brain tells us to avoid trouble. "Don't rock the boat," says the lizard brain. And we listen. — Ryan Hanley

Natural death is independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull witted jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished prisoner shall die. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. — John F. Kennedy

This house could have been a prison or a hospital, but a prison where they locked up the innocent to prevent them from suffering, or a hospital where one goes to recover from the labor of life. And Monelle was both the jailer and the nurse. — Marcel Schwob

A jailer is as much a prisoner as his prisoner. — Mahatma Gandhi

I would rather have the United States as the world's policeman than the Soviet Union as the world's jailer. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

He's a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's really on the ball. — Cory Doctorow

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell. — Erving Goffman

Life is the jailer of the soul in this filthy prison, and its only deliverer is death. — Charles Caleb Colton

She was prisoner to an old, forgotten god, kept from her home, probably never to see it again, and yet ... the way she sat, poised, calm, clear like a full moon night, she seemed much happier than me, the witch who contained them all, the jailer with the magic key. — Sarah Diemer

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality. — Azar Nafisi

The worst imposition of all was to be instructed to take on some costly, long-standing obligation to the crown. Such was the fate of Bess of Hardwick's husband, the sixth Lord Shrewsbury. For sixteen years he was required to act as jailer to Mary, Queen of Scots, which in effect meant maintaining the court of a small, fantastically disloyal state in his own home. — Bill Bryson

Americans are given the sole option of electing their jailer for four years and sometimes do him the honour of re-electing him. — Che Guevara

I lay there, no longer fighting, since my head was spinning too much. And because I wasn't going to win anyway. And because I kind of liked the feeling of sensual captivity, at least by this particular jailer. — Karen Chance

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other. — Azar Nafisi

When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try to bear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity. — Dale Carnegie

Early in 1203 John sent instructions to the royal servant Hubert de Burgh, who was serving as Arthur's jailer, demanding that he should blind and castrate his prisoner. Fortunately for Arthur, de Burgh felt a pang of conscience and could not carry out the grisly sentence on the sixteen-year-old, who pleaded for pity. — Dan Jones

Cage of freedom, that's our prison; we're the jailer and captive combined Cage of freedom, cast in power; all the trappings of our own design. Blind ambition, steals our reason; we're soon behind those invisible bars On the inside, looking outside; to make it safer we double the guard. — Jon Anderson

The prisoner is the jailer's jailer. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Captivity is always captivity, no matter how gentle the jailer. — John Hargrove

Right, that's exactly what I mean by your being both the prisoner and the jailer. — Irvin D. Yalom

The most exacting jailer is our own conscience. — Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Secrets are strange wild things that fight against their very existence. Try to contain them and they will strain the seams, weaken the ropes, wear down their jailer until they are revealed. — Suzanne Selfors

A prisoner is imprisoned by the crime that he has committed. A jailer is imprisoned - in the very same prison - by the employment contract that he has signed. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I will be living with chronic pain for the rest of my life. I don't have the mobility, energy or life options I used to have. I work hard to manage the pain, and I want the medical system to be a respectful and effective partner, not a jailer. The opioid crisis is not my doing. — Sonya Huber

As a jailer, I never got to understand my charges. But when I became a bandit, I spent a lot of time being close to the lowliest of the low: criminals, the enslaved, deserters, men who had nothing to lose. Contrary to what I had expected, I found that they had a hardscrabble beauty and grace. They were not mean in their nature, but made mean by the meanness of their rulers. The poor were willing to endure much, but the emperor had taken everything from them. — Ken Liu

In lieu of those checks and balances central to our legal system,
non-citizens face an executive that is now investigator, prosecutor,
judge, jury and jailer or executioner. In an Orwellian twist, Bush's
order calls this Soviet-style abomination 'a full and fair trial. — William Safire

Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer. — Dorothy Rowe

Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself? — Pearl S. Buck

His father's last word, which Sean had never told anyone, not even his mother, hadn't been goodbye: it had been hello. He hadn't died; he'd been set free from the constraints of history and flesh. And while the fathers of other children could only be the people they were, and were forced to live the lives they'd made for themselves, the Philip Steiner of his son's daydreams was all the possible versions of himself that Sean could imagine. He was always near, always ready to listen, always offering solace. He was all the possible fathers. He was a dragonslayer and a titan of industry; he was a cunning detective and a grizzled gunfighter; he was an astronaut and a priest and a jailer of thieves. He lived in the shadows, and he filled his son's world with light. — Dexter Palmer

the nurse who'd prostituted her profession to act as jailer, — M.R. Hall

I needed a man," Call replied. "I was hoping he might turn out to be a fighter." "No, he's just a jailer," Billy said. — Larry McMurtry

And in the echo of that gladness, horror blooms within me. In its own strange way, it's a horror as deep as any I've experienced so far. I've succeeded in taking another human hostage, in making him urinate on himself. I made a plan to torture someone, and then I carried it out, and it satisfied me to do so. As much hurt and hell as the Wolfman has caused, I don't want to be his judge and jury, his jailer and tormentor. I don't want to be that person. I want to be good. I don't want to fall into a big, black pit of darkness, because what if I can't get out? — Carolyn Lee Adams

No leader or organization can achieve breakout growth until it treats, "we've always done it this way" as an opportunity to think anew rather than as a reason to stop thinking. Keep in mind, tradition should be a guide, not a jailer. — Michael Josephson

Church membership was so important that Paul and Silas baptized the Philippian jailer into the membership of Christ's church at midnight with Paul's back still bloody from a beating! He did not even wait till morning! Identification with Christ's church is important; without it, one must be treated 'as a heathen and publican.' — Jay Adams

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self! — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Consider me your rescuer, not your jailer," he said to Frankie, without looking at her. His gut told him that, on the criminal mastermind scale, this one landed closer to Tinker Bell than Lizzie Borden. — Roxanne Snopek

Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students' hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer. — Azar Nafisi

Ah," said the jailer, "do not always brood over what is impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight. — Alexandre Dumas

her jailer. She wrapped her arms — Mia Thorne

Captain Hale, alone, without sympathy or support, save that from above, on the near approach of death asked for a clergyman to attend him. It was refused. He then requested a Bible; that too was refused by his inhuman jailer. — William Hull

But Agon did not force this prison upon you. He is the jailer of many, but you are the one who possesses the keys to your own cell. He may hunt you, but he did not lock you away here, nor force upon you the choices you have made these last few years. Your prison is in your mind, where you limit yourself, where you take on the voice of the Beast and speak to yourself the way he would if he could only get to you. But he does not need to if you will do the work for him. Fear is what locked you away, Ifferon, and fear is a tool of Agon. When you fear you open the gate that lets him into your mind. His greatest weapon is fear, for it drives strong men to madness. So why then be afraid? — Dean F. Wilson

Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors,
why the judge does not dismiss his case,
why the preacher does not dismisshis congregation! It is because they do not obey the hint God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers to all. — Henry David Thoreau

At the sessions after I was indicted for an upholder and maintainer of unlawful assemblies and conventicles, and for not conforming to the national worship of the church of England; and after some conference there with the justices, they taking my plain dealing with them for a confession, as they termed it, of the indictment, did sentence me to a perpetual banishment, because I refused to conform. So being again delivered up to the jailer's hands, I was had home to prison, and there have lain now complete twelve years, waiting to see what God would suffer these men to do with me. — John Bunyan

This was a part he didn't like. It made him feel like a jailer, or a kidnapper.
"Another sin, another string of Hail Marys," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed. So much was riding on this. It could all blow up in their faces. If he was still a betting man, that's where he'd lay his money. Too many moving parts that weren't in line with one another.
Praying wasn't an option. God didn't have time for deceivers. — Hunter Shea

The jailer voiced a roar that was intended to be on par with that of an infuriated lion, and indeed sounded like that to him in his own head (but to an observer or listener was much more akin to a consumptive mallard) and sped - which is to say moved with slightly less slowness than he typically did - to the cell that he had just absented. — Peter David

Jenny couldn't believe herself a multiple. She was a mother, a nurse, not that screwball who appeared on the screen like some dysfunctional figment of her imagination trying to find a life. Still, she was coming to a realization that accepting who she was would be the jailer's key to liberate her from this cuckoo's nest. — Judy Byington

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgement of men. For them, no extenuating circumstances; even the good intention is ascribed to crime. Have you at least heard of the spitting cell, which a nation recently thought up to prove itself the greatest on earth? A walled-up box in which the prisoner can stand without moving. The solid door that locks him in the cement shell stops at chin level. Hence only his face is visible, and every passing jailer spits copiously on it. The prisoner, wedged into his cell, cannot wipe his face, though he is allowed, it is true. to close his eyes. Well, that, mon cher, is a human invention. They didn't need God for that little masterpiece. — Albert Camus

I've had some good times, had some bad. Took some lumps. Scored some points. Half-way through life, at 43, I still say, 'go for broke.' No government, no FBI, no judge, no jailer is ever gonna make me say 'uncle.' Now, as then, let the game continue. I bet my stake on freedom's call; I'll play these cards with no regrets. — Abbie Hoffman

Although you should not erase your responsibility for the past, when you make the past your jailer, you destroy your future. It is such a great moment of liberation when you learn to forgive yourself, let the burden go, and walk out into a new path of promise and possibility. — John O'Donohue

The Bible says a great deal about entire families coming to Christ. Rahab the harlot ... the Philippian jailer ... and Cornelius, the Roman centurion. That could be true in your family too. You may be the one who could lead your family to Christ. — Billy Graham

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer. — W. Somerset Maugham

In front the sea was spread, a smiling jailer, but even more incorruptible than the frowning mountains. — O. Henry

[Thoreau's] famous night in jail took place about halfway through his stay in the cabin on Emerson's woodlot at Walden Pond. His two-year stint in the small cabin he built himself is often portrayed as a monastic retreat from the world of human affairs into the world of nautre, though he went back to town to eat with and talk to friends and family and to pick up money doing odd jobs that didn't fit into Walden's narrative. He went to jail both because the town jailer ran into him while he was getting his shoe mended and because he felt passionately enough about national affairs to refuse to pay his tax. To be in the woods was not to be out of society or politics. — Rebecca Solnit

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

I live in company with a body, a silent companion, exacting and eternal. He it is who notes that individuality which is the seal of the weakness of our race. My soul has wings, but the brutal jailer is strict. — Eugene Delacroix

The jailer is you. You're the only person who has the key to your cell. You're the only one who can open the door that leads to freedom. — Norman Vincent Peale

Winter's hard-packed snow Cedes to the fruitful summer; stubborn night At last removes, for day's white steeds to shine. The dread blast of the gale slackens and gives Peace to the sounding sea; and Sleep, strong jailer, In time yields up his captive. Shall not I Learn place and wisdom? — Michael K. Kellogg

Their conversations were often charged with an excitement out of proportion to what they talked about... Their words seemed to glimmer in the air between them, dangerous metallic threads that quickly connected both of them to books and ideas, to language itself. The jailer told Teza about the daring subject matter of the famous writer Ju's recent novel, in which a passionate young man falls in love with an older woman, but the story, as he was telling it, became a metaphor for their own deepening and forbidden association....Teza refused to act like a prisoner, which freed Chit Naing from acting like a jailer. — Karen Connelly

It's about realizing, painfully, you've kept that voice inside yourself, locked away from even yourself. And you step back and see that your jailer has changed faces. You realize you've become your own jailer. — Tori Amos