Titon Rahmawan quote: “The burden of desire makes man a slave of his own will.”

“Make your own rules or be a slave to another man's.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

“Desire makes slaves out of kings, and patience makes kings out of slaves.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

al-Ghazali https://awakenthegreatnesswithin.com/35-inspirational-imam-al-ghazali-quotes-on-success/

“The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Source: The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)
Context: Only a few years ago there was a great awakening of the human mind. Men began to inquire by what right a crowned robber made them work for him? The man who asked this question was called a traitor. Others asked by what right does a robed hypocrite rule my thought? Such men were called infidels. The priest said, and the king said, where is this spirit of investigation to stop? They said then and they say now, that it is dangerous for man to be free. I deny it. Out on the intellectual sea there is room enough for every sail. In the intellectual air there is space enough for every wing.
The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.

“Only in thought is man a God; in action and desire we are the slaves of circumstance.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Lucy Donnely, November 25, 1902
1900s

“The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885) When it was the Three Hundred and Sixtieth Night, footnote

“Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty, on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (1799)

“Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

“As long as a man has desires there is no end to his transmigration. It is the desires alone that make him take one body after another. There will be rebirth for a man if he has even the desire to eat a piece of candy.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 292]

“What makes loneliness an anguish
Is not that I have no one to share my burden,
But this:
I have only my own burden to bear.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

“The burden of desire makes man a slave of his own will.”

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