make sure
the walls
you build
to protect yourself
do not become a prison

Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.

...most of us build prisons for ourselves and after we occupy them for a period of time we become accustomed to their walls and accept the false premise that we are incarcerated for life. As soon as that belief takes hold of us we abandon hope of ever doing more with our lives and of ever giving our dreams a chance to be fulfilled. We become puppets and begin to suffer living deaths. It may be praiseworthy and noble to sacrifice your life to a cause or a business or the happiness of others, but if you are miserable and unfulfilled in that lifestyle, and know it, then to remain in it is a hypocrisy, a lie, and a rejection of the faith placed in you by your creator.

What you took as yourself begins to look like a little prison-house far away in the valley beneath you.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

Go into your mind, analyze your mind. Somewhere you have tricked yourself.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

we all have the right to protect ourselves from pain, but be aware that these walls can turn from protection into prison — the more walls we build around ourselves, the less space we have to grow and be free.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.

At first, the drudgery of mastering your craft is a prison — boring, slow, and with an awareness of how much time you’ll have to put in. But somewhere along your prison sentence, you come to see the time you put into your work not as dull and meager, but as meaningful — and you realize that your prison has become your palace, your place of escape.