"Free spirit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... numberless suggestions and compel you to ask a host of questions, perhaps you will do as we have done,—spend a long time in training your wings to be swift enough to take the journey yourself. If you will not do this, you must patiently wait until the clods of clay are shaken off, so that your free spirit may go out to live the life more ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... that the time had come when he could tell her all, it was a harder thing to do than he had thought. If she withdrew from him now—what would she do after she had learned? Yet he must do this to be a free man, to be even a free spirit. There must be no more shadows between them, not even shadows of ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... influenced at present by the French and Italian examples, we may be sure that she is too intelligent and too fond of freedom to long tolerate any system of chaperonage that she cannot control. She will find a way to modify the traditional conventionalities so as not to fetter her own free spirit. It may be her mission to show the world a social order free from the forward independence and smartness of which she has been accused, and yet relieved of the dull stiffness of the older forms. It is enough now to notice that a change is going on, due ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... last seventeen months, as the motions of a rod of power needlessly held over the people to overawe them, serving no earthly good, but souring their minds and embittering their passions; the crown officials represented this chafing of the free spirit at the incidents of military rule as a sign of the lost authority of Government and of a desire for independence. Among the fiery spirits, accurately on both sides the mob-element, the ropewalk affair was regarded as a drawn game, and a renewal of the fight was desired on the ground that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... of an ingenious and free spirit, eager and constant in reproof, without fear controlling the world's abuses. One whom no servile hope of gain, or frosty apprehension of danger, can make to be a parasite, either to time, place, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... attention, intuition), as representation (passive memory, phantasy, memory), and (as conceiving, judging, reasoning) thought; Practical Intelligence as feeling, impulse (passion and caprice), and happiness; finally, the unity of the knowing and willing spirit, free spirit or rational will, which in turn realizes itself ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... have no other view than to promote the public good, and am unambitious of honors not founded in the approbation of my country, I would not desire in the least degree to suppress a free spirit of inquiry into any part of my conduct, that even faction itself may deem reprehensible. The anonymous paper handed to you exhibits many serious charges, and it is my wish that it should be submitted to Congress. This I am the more inclined to the suppression or concealment ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... when day was o'er; And the welcome tones I knew: Like the voices of those who have gone before, The Beautiful and the True. And it turned my thoughts to that blissful time When ceaseth cold winter's breath; When the free spirit shall seek that clime Where there is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... Here the free spirit of mankind, at length, Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place A limit to the giant's unchained strength, Or curb his swiftness in the ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a cheerful, willing, free spirit, disposed to serve our neighbour voluntarily, without taking any account of gratitude or ingratitude, praise or blame, gain or loss. Its object is not to lay men under obligations, nor does it distinguish between friends and enemies, or look to gratitude or ingratitude, but most freely ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... San Francisco's care-free spirit was fully exemplified before the ashes of the great fire of 1906 were cold. On every hand one could find little eating places established in the streets, some made of abandoned boxes, others of debris from the burned buildings, and some in vacant basements and little ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... that a popular principle would insensibly have entered the forms of the constitution they transplanted. In the first place, the power of the prince would be more circumscribed—in the next place, the free spirit of the aristocracy would be more diffused: the first, because the authority of the chief would rarely be derived from royal ancestry, or hallowed by prescriptive privilege; in most cases he was but a noble, selected from the ranks, and crippled by the jealousies, of his order: ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... captive, fearful and uncertain spirit, ye do not have, says the apostle. Ye are not compelled to live continually in fear of wrath and condemnation as are the followers of Moses and all who are under the Law. On the contrary, ye have a delightful, free spirit, one confident and contented, such as a child entertains toward its father, and ye need not fear that God is angry with you or will cast you off and condemn you. For ye have the Spirit of his Son (as he says above and in Galatians 4, 6) in your heart and know that ye shall remain in his ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... spirit. The advocates for the large estates tell us, that the masses are too ill-educated to be trusted with independence; that without authority over them, these small proprietors become wasteful, careless, improvident; that the free spirit becomes a democratic and dangerous spirit; and finally, that the resources of the land cannot properly be brought out by men without capital to cultivate it. Either theory is plausible. The advocates of both can support their arguments with an appeal to experience; and the verdict of ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the English power; its population had been under English dominion so many generations that they were hardly French now, save in language. The place was strongly garrisoned. Joan was taken there near the end of December, 1430, and flung into a dungeon. Yes, and clothed in chains, that free spirit! ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... will is the highest law—would not brook the inflexible dogmatism of the Greek nor the iron ecclesiasticism of the Roman. The Teuton loved liberty in religion as well as in other things, and asserted his right to stand before his God for himself. The free spirit revealed in Christianity through Luther can never die. "Christianity as an authoritative letter is Roman; as a free ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Slingsby not to break down or depress the free spirit of the boys, by harshness and slavish fear, but to lead them freely and joyously on in the path of knowledge, making it pleasant and desirable in their eyes. He wished to see the youth trained up in the manners and habitudes of the peasantry of the good old times, and thus to lay a ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... the machine's operations. Our habitual associations of ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain. If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by brain currents, and these by purely ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... (as we may venture to call it) begins with a breath of new harmony, or is it a blended magic of rhythm, tune and chord? Far more than merely bizarre, it calls up a vision of Celtic warriors, the wild, free spirit of Northern races. The rushing jig ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... he was sorry to hear that; he said one of his companies needed an ad writer, and he didn't have any objection to hiring a free spirit with a punch, but he couldn't consider getting anyone to write ads that hated money, for there was a salary ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... life all a labyrinth around them—came to seek the clew that should guide them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists—whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron framework—travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
