The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
Interpretation
True freedom comes with the responsibility of self-ownership and the consequences of one's choices.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton articulates the idea that genuine freedom is inherently tied to the ability to make choices about one's own life, including the potential to make poor decisions. He suggests that a person who is unable to make these choices—who cannot choose to engage in potentially harmful behaviors like overeating or gambling—is not truly free, akin to being comparable to an animal without autonomy.
In practice
In a discussion about personal responsibility at a seminar on self-improvement.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Cheat? Good heavens, this is an amateur cricket match amongst leading prep schools, I'm an Englishman and a schoolmaster supposedly setting an example to his young charges. We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game ever devised. Of course I'll cunting well cheat. Now, give me my robe and put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me.
If you can let go of (the Tao) with your mind and surround it with your heart, it will live inside you forever.
But this was what happened when you didn't want to visit and confront the past: the past starts visiting and confronting you.
To know that you are neither the body nor mind, watch yourself steadily and live unaffected by your body and mind, completely aloof, as if you were dead. It means you have no vested interests, either in the body or in the mind.
Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.
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