men are
mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up
of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the
causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom,
therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their
actions. As for their saying that human actions depend on the
will, this is a mere phrase without any idea to correspond
thereto. What the will is, and how it moves the body, they none
of them know; those who boast of such knowledge, and feign
dwellings and habitations for the soul, are wont to provoke
either laughter or disgust. So, again, when we look at the sun,
we imagine that it is distant from us about two hundred feet;
this error does not lie solely in this fancy, but in the fact
that, while we thus imagine, we do not know the sun's true
distance or the cause of the fancy. For although we afterwards
learn, that the sun is distant from us more than six hundred of
the earth's diameters, we none the less shall fancy it to be near;
for we do not imagine the sun as near us, because we are
ignorant of its true distance, but because the modification of
our body involves the essence of the sun, in so far as our said
body is affected thereby.

One must be very naïve or dishonest to imagine that men choose their beliefs independently of their situation.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinion about the things.

Some men <i>think</i> because they're afraid to <i>do</i>.

It is the thoughts of men that are deceitful, Their pledges that are loose.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.

The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims.

For it is because he acts ignorantly, with a wrong intelligence and therefore a wrong will in these matters, that man is or seems to be bound by his works; otherwise works are no bondage to the free soul.

Only free men can change their minds and be surprised; and while no men are completely free, some are freer than others.

Few men think, yet all will have opinions. Hence men’s opinions are superficial and confused.

What disturbs men's minds is not events but their judgements on events:

The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the offing, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.