Quotes About Solitude

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

Boys need to learn the value of spiritual solitude. For the soul to grow, it needs those moments of no-stimulation, of wakeful peace. Because we adults don't usually practice enough solitude—because we are always 'doing' things—we often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.

Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

I think the call of the inward life starts here. Solitude helps you differentiate, define the borders of the self. Solitude helps you figure our where everybody else stops and you begins.

Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude.

St. John of the Cross points out that the divine music can best be heard in solitude and silence. The sonorous music is not a physical sound that vibrates the eardrum but something transcending the senses. Physical solitude and silence remove the distracting noises that prevent us from hearing on deeper levels.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Deliberately seeking solitude-quality time spent away from family and friends-may seem selfish. It is not. Solitude is as necessary for our creative spirits to develop and flourish as are sleep and food for our bodies to survive.

The necessary thing is after all but this; solitude, great inner solitude. Going into oneself for hours meeting no one - this one must be able to attain.

She had dreamed some brilliant dreams during the past winter and now they lay in the dust around her. In her present mood of self-disgust, she could not immediately begin dreaming again. And she discovered that, while solitude with dreams is glorious, solitude without them has few charms.

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, the most solitary of places.

Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions──a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard──can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

Solitude terrifies the soul at twenty.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be; Where all the noises, that on peace intrude, Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee, Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

What now on the other hand makes people sociable is their incapacity to endure solitude and thus themselves.

The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life….every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood…. Your job is to marshal the talent you do have and find people who believe in your work. What’s important, finally, is that you create, and that those creations define for you what matters most, that which cannot be extinguished even in the face of silence, solitude, and rejection.

The Spiritual Disciplines are things that we do. We must never lose sight of this fact. It is one thing to talk piously about 'the solitude of the heart,' but if that does not somehow work its way into our experience, then we have missed the point of the Disciplines. We are dealing with actions, not merely states of mind.

Loneliness becomes a lover, solitude a darling sin.

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.

Strength comes from solitude, a waiting, a communion with the best in us, which is at one with the divine spark.

And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to you to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy.

The rishis of old attained the Knowledge of Brahman. One cannot have this so long as there is the slightest trace of worldliness. How hard the rishis laboured ! Early in the morning they would go away from the hermitage, and would spend the whole day in solitude, meditating on Brahman. At night they would return to the hermitage and eat a little fruit or roots. They kept their mind aloof from the objects of sight, hearing, touch, and other things of a worldly nature. Only thus did they realize Brahman as their own inner conciousness.

We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Christ choosing solitude for private prayer, doth not only hint to us the danger of distraction and deviation of thoughts in prayer, but how necessary it is for us to choose the most convenient places we can for private prayer. Our own fickleness and Satan's restlessness call upon us to get into such places where we may freely pour out our soul into the bosom of God [Mark 1.35].

The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.

She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.

Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.

But the touch or company of any man whatsoever stirreth up their heat, which in their solitude was hushed and quiet, and lay as cinders raked up in ashes.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place.