Popular quotes about Solitude! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. loneliness is small, solitude is large. loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nodbody answers; solitude has it's roots in the great silence of eternity.
Kent NerburnEvery 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 manโs 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
Paul AusterBoys 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 solitudeโbecause we are always 'doing' thingsโwe often neglect to teach our boys to find solitude
Michael GurianCommunity always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing.
Henri NouwenIt is in solitude that the works of hand, heart and mind are always conceived, and in solitude that individuality must be affirmed.
Robert M. LindnerIn certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.
Haruki MurakamiNothing can be done without solitude. I've created my own solitude which nobody suspects
Pablo PicassoIt is right that you have to have a tolerance for solitude. But when that solitude bears fruit, you can abandon it. You can be in the company of others.
Richard FordSelf Esteem::"It is very easy in the world to live by the opinion of the world. It is very easy in solitude to be self-centered. But the finished man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. I knew a man of simple habits and earnest character who never put out his hands nor opened his lips to court the public, and having survived several rotten reputations of younger men, honor came at last and sat down with him upon his private bench from which he had never stirred."
Ralph Waldo EmersonThe true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.
Harold BloomThe numbing mind-ream of knowing you're alone not because people won't accept you but because you find so little worth accepting. An imposed solitude is better than simply tolerating your company in waiting for something better. So loneliness is not such a terrible thing when you consider that the alternative to thought provoking solace is to be surrounded only by remindings of why that solitude is preferable.
Jhonen VasquezThe city does not take away, neither does the country give, solitude; solitude is within us.
Philibert Joseph RouxI'm pretty social so it's hard for me to find solitude, but I need to have solitude to write.
Catie CurtisA creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheSolitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thought and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society can ill do without.
John Stuart MillIn solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia WoolfThe nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a manโs true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweepโs Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.
Franz KafkaOur religious activities should be ordered in such a way as to have plenty of time for the cultivation of the fruits of solitude and silence.
Aiden Wilson TozerSolitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.
Henri NouwenCrowded places, I shunned them as noises too rude / And flew to the silence of sweet solitude.
John ClareTo go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.
Ralph Waldo EmersonInward solitude has outward manifestations. There is the freedom to be alone, not in order to be away from people but in order to hear the divine Whisper better.
Richard J. FosterThis was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.
Elizabeth GilbertWhen the men of antiquity realized their wishes, benefits were conferred by them on the people. If they did not realize their wishes, they cultivated their personal character, and became illustrious in the world. If poor, they attended to their own virtue in solitude; if advanced to dignity, they made the whole empire virtuous as well.
MenciusThe artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.
Peter SchjeldahlMy favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
James PattersonI have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses โ that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
Pablo NerudaSolitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
Jean GenetJust like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women, others with none. Itโs whatโs known as โthe law of the marketโโฆ In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude.
Michel HouellebecqThere are beauties of character which, like the night-blooming cereus, are closed against the glare and turbulence of every-day life, and bloom only in shade and solitude, and beneath the quiet stars.
Henry Theodore TuckermanO Lord, please fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff, and nudge me when I've said enough. Enlightenment is the "quiet acceptance of what is" I believe the truly enlightened beings are those who refuse to allow themselves to be distressed over things that simply are the way they are. - Wayne Dyer Learn the richness of solitude and quiet. That "still small voice" is yearning to be heard.
Susan JeffersIn a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.
Anthony StorrIt is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
Rainer Maria RilkeSolitude with God repairs the damage done by the fret and noise and clamour of the world.
Oswald ChambersSolitude is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
Samuel JohnsonWe 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!
Edwin Hubbel ChapinThe 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.
Emile M. CioranCertain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh