Quotes from Ashtavakra Gita

If one thinks one is free, one is free; and if one thinks of oneself as bound, one is bound. Here this saying "Thinking makes it so" is true.

You are really unbound and actionless, self-illuminating and spotless already. The cause of your bondage is that you are resorting to stilling the mind.

I am not the body, nor is the body mine. I am not a living being, I am consciousness. It was my thirst for living that was my bondage.

Who is to be compared to the great-souled person whose mind is free of desire, free of expectation and disappointment, and who has found satisfaction in self-knowledge?

How should a strong-souled person who knows that whatever is seen is by its very nature nothing, how then consider one thing to be grasped and another to be rejected?

For one who has eliminated attachment, who is free from dualism and from desire and from repulsion, for such a one an object that comes of itself is neither painful nor pleasurable.

You are not bound by anything. What does a pure person like you need to renounce? Equal in pain and in pleasure, equal in hope and in disappointment, equal in life and in death, and complete as you are, you can go to your rest.

Bondage is when the mind longs for something, grieves about something, rejects something, holds on to something, is pleased about something, or displeased about something.

Liberation is when the mind does not long for anything, grieve about anything, reject anything, or hold on to anything, and is not pleased about anything or displeased about anything.

Bondage is when the mind is tangled in one of the senses, and liberation is when the mind is not tangled in any of the sense.

When there is no "me", that is liberation, and when there is me there is bondage. Considering this earnestly, I do not hold on and do not reject.

The essential nature of bondage is nothing other than desire, and its elimination is known as liberation. It is simply by not being attached to changing things that the everlasting joy of attainment is reached.