Twenty Walls You Might Be Living Inside

Man rarely blames himself for the room he's standing in. He names the government, the family, the past, and rarely asks who first imagined the walls. Twenty lines below, none of them in the order the book gives them, because a wall is easier to see from an angle you didn't expect.

"The prison becomes complete when the prisoner no longer remembers what the walls were built to prevent him from seeing."

"Man does not merely enter prisons; he constructs them, protects them, furnishes them."

"What he calls freedom is often only the permission to select the shape of the next enclosure."

"The bird does not dream of the sky because it has studied liberty; it dreams of the sky because it has met the cage."

"Bondage is not determined only by what a person does. It is revealed by what he cannot stop doing without feeling that he is becoming nothing."

"The outer prison tells a man where he may go. The inner prison tells him what he must become before he can permit himself peace."

"A prisoner is not liberated merely because he despises the prison."

"The cage may be cruel, but it is legible."

"The prison becomes a dark mirror, and in that mirror man discovers that the architect, the guard and the prisoner have often been speaking with the same voice."

"They are not always defending pain. They are defending the self that pain has allowed them to recognise."

"The first prison is not the place that prevents a man from leaving. It is the meaning that enters him before he knows there is somewhere else to go."

"A wall that can be seen may be challenged. A wall that becomes sight itself cannot."

"We say, 'This is who I am,' because it is less frightening than saying, 'This is what I became in order to remain loved.'"

"It is possible that much of what we call order is organised fear."

"A command becomes powerful when it sounds like the person's own voice."

"The most effective prison requires no locked door. It requires a person who feels guilty when he approaches the door."

"What is personality if not memory that has learned to behave consistently?"

"Whatever a man cannot imagine himself without has probably entered the architecture of his prison."

"The first wall is the answer given too early to the question of who we are."

"What remains when ownership, injury, applause, certainty, usefulness and opposition are removed?"

The Introduction and Chapter One of The Wisdom of Bondage go further into every wall named here. Free to listen to the moment you become a member.