Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances well beyond our control. Having more freedom seems better than having less. But to what end? The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to live for, so ultimately is autonomy.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting freedom, but it may feel empty once you’ve attained it.

Freedom is something that dies unless it's used.

Your life is ultimately measured by your outcomes, not your intentions. It is not about what you wanted to do or would have done but didn’t have the time. It’s not about why you thought you couldn’t; it’s just whether or not you eventually did.

Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

We have a tendency to romanticize independence and see autonomy as a virtue. In my experience, such a view is a career killer. Autonomy is a life vest made out of sand. Independent people who do not have the skills to think and act interdependently may still be good individual producers, but they won’t be seen as good leaders or team players.

You have to remember that freedom is the highest value and if love is not giving you freedom then it is not love. Freedom is a criterion: anything that gives you freedom is right, and anything that destroys your freedom is wrong. If you can remember this small criterion your life, slowly, will start settling on the right path about everything: your relationships, your meditations, your creativity, whatever you are.

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no
real value in itself; for what is boredom but the feeling of the emptiness of life? If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Freedom may be the most important thing in life, but there's such a thing as too much freedom.

If the pursuit of happiness pulls us all back into childishness, then fake freedom conspires to keep us there. Because freedom is not having more brands of cereal to choose from, or more beach vacations to take selfies on, or more satellite channels to fall asleep to. That is variety. And in a vacuum, variety is meaningless. If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, and hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free.

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy — you may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.