Popular quotes about Solitude! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.
Maggie NelsonThere is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.
May SartonFor me parks are good when first of all, they're not impeccable, and when solitude has appropriated them in such a way that solitude itself becomes an emblem, a defining trait for walkers, sporadic at best, who in my opinion should be irrevocably lost or absorbed in thought, and a bit confused, too, as when one walks through a space that's at once alien and familiar.
Sergio ChejfecOnly in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude.
Miguel de UnamunoSolitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.
Henri NouwenSolitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes.
Thomas MertonThe mark of solitude is silence, as speech is the mark of community. Silence and speech have the same inner correspondence and difference as do solitude and community. One does not exist without the other. Right speech comes out of silence, and right silence comes out of speech.
Dietrich BonhoefferA creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheConcerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.
Sigmund FreudThe man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.
Thomas MertonIn solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia WoolfI've always felt that complement of opposites: body and soul, solitude and companionship, and in the dance studio, contraction and release, rise and fall.
Judith JamisonThe power to bring me out of solitude - or to push me back into it - had never belonged to another person. It was mine and only mine.
Martha BeckOne man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to loose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.
Friedrich NietzscheLittle as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
Edith WhartonKaramakate says, "to become a warrior, every Cohiuano man must leave everything behind and go into the jungle, guided only by his dreams. In that journey, he has to discover, in solitude and silence, who he really is."
Tom ColeFeeling weightless... it's so many things together. A feeling of pride, of healthy solitude, of dignified freedom from everything that's dirty, sticky. You feel exquisitely comfortable... and you feel you have so much energy, such an urge to do things, such an ability to do things. And you work well, yes, you think well, without sweat, without difficulty as if the biblical curse in the sweat of thy face and in sorrow no longer exists, As if you've been born again.
Wally SchirraIt has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.
Austin PhelpsMy favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.
James PattersonAs the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places. She is when we hear inwardly, sound when we hear outwardly. Creation has not displaced her, but is her visible framework and foil. All sounds are her servants, and purveyors, proclaiming not only that their mistress is, but is a rare mistress, and earnestly to be sought after.
Henry David ThoreauAll my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.
Francoise SaganYour solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.
Rainer Maria RilkeWe 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.
Aldous HuxleyI require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.
Jane HirshfieldMy dear friend, Bonnie, is a person who rests and, consequently, earned my ire early in our relationship. Her ability to rest eventually taught me incredibly valuable lessons about the art of taking time-outs. To this day, Bonnie is astutely aware of times when her energy dips too low and resolutely honors her need to rest. To boost her energy, she's been known to sit quietly with a cup of tea, adjourn a workshop we were co-facilitating to take a five-minute breather, or slip out of her own wedding reception to be restored by a few minutes of solitude in the sun.
Sue ThoeleVirtue could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all-to ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day; But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun.
John MiltonSolitude offers a lot that being coupled or being in a group does not. It helps us learn what we are capable of.
Alix Kates ShulmanHe gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.
Thomas PynchonO 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 JeffersGod is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of self.
Pope Benedict XVISolitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.
William Gilmore SimmsNo Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
C. S. LewisSolitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.
May SartonFly-fishing is a magic way to recapture the rapture of solitude without the pangs of loneliness.
John D. VoelkerThe simplest spiritual discipline is some degree of solitude and silence. But it's the hardest, because none of us want to be with someone we don't love. Besides that, we invariably feel bored with ourselves, and all of our loneliness comes to the surface.We won't have the courage to go into that terrifying place without Love to protect us and lead us, without the light and love of God overriding our own self-doubt. Such silence is the most spacious and empowering technique in the world, yet it's not a technique at all. It's precisely the refusal of all technique.
Richard RohrSolitude is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue. Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.
Samuel JohnsonIf we can't even spend a short amount of time each day with God in solitude, our spiritual formation will be seriously stunted.
Tricia RhodesSolitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
Abraham Joshua HeschelChrist 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].
Thomas BrooksEvery 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.
Gaston BachelardHere is the infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human being looking at me.
Martin Buber