Quotes about solitude

I was a man who thrived on solitude without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.

We enter into solitude first of all to meet our Lord and to be with Him and Him alone. Only in the context of grace can we face our sin only in the place of healing do we dare to show our wounds only with a single-minded attention to Christ can we give up our clinging fears and face our own true nature. Solitude is a place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world.

You can be in love with solitude it won’t last long! You can be in love with crowds it won’t last long!

We take our fetters with us our freedom is not total: we still turn our gaze towards the things we have left behind our imagination is full of them.

Love makes me nakedPropinquity's a harsh masterO the songs we hide singing to ourselves!

Someone who's awake in the middle of the night is a soul consciousness when everyone else is asleep, and that creates a feeling of solitude in poetry that I very much like.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

But I think there's something wonderful and extraordinary about climbing on your own and just that kind of relationship to the environment. I'm very addicted to the mountains. You know, so, I do like that solitude.

Solitude is the place where we can connect with profound bonds that are deeper than the emergency bonds of fear and anger.

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

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

Solitude vivifies isolation kills.

God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt In solitude, where we are least alone.

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

The holiest of all holidays are thoseKept by ourselves in silence and apartThe secret anniversaries of the heart.

My aloneness had never bothered me I hadn't even been aware of it. But now it overwhelmed me. The awareness washed over me with painful sharpness and deep grief. Now that I had company.

Loneliness is the poverty of self solitude is richness of self.

But the night doesn't swallow her up.Everywhere she goes she is still therethe silence is as big as herself.

Long have I dwelt forgotten hereIn pining woe and dull despairThis place of solitude and gloomMust be my dungeon and my tomb.

Solitude is strength to depend on the presence of the crowd is weakness. The man who needs a mob to nerve him is much more alone than he imagines.

Retire within yourselves but first prepare yourselves to receive yourselves there. It would be madness to trust yourselves to yourselves if you do not know how to control yourselves. There are ways of failing in solitude as well as in company.

I fear that moments of quietude are on the endangered list right behind solitude.

There was an emptiness about the heart of life an attic room. Women must put off their rich apparel. At midday they must disrobe.

Solitude has seven skins nothing gets through any more.

I need solitude for my writing not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind the writing will demand it of you.

Solitude is un-American.

Alone let him constantly meditate in solitude on that which is salutary for his soul, for he who meditates in solitude attains supreme bliss.

Solitude is better than the society of evil persons.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

Solitude shows us what should be society shows us what we are.

Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person’s capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.

I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.

Experience has tutored me well that most will lie or cheat to get the better hand. It's why I prefer solitude to social interaction. - Bethany

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

Thinking is a way of condemning oneself to solitude.

Now I have to lie on the bed for a few minutes and let the solitude gather round me once more.

The image of a cleanly, self-possessed man exploiting his solitude was not easy to come by, but then he had not expected that it would be.

We enter this universe alone in search of microscopic beauty—and while we love, or are loved by others—we leave this world completely alone, having only found infinite sorrow. Despite there being so many of us, each of us tragically realizes that everyone is on a solitary journey. No one else can see what we see, hear what we hear, feel, what we feel. All we have of each other are glimpses of moments, whispers of experiences, memories of the past we wish we could make eternal, but in the end, we

Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man's lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smelling of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings

Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world.

What other knowledge will my solitude and muteness bring? What other worlds?

. . . I am in my hermitage perhaps 70 to 80 percent of the time. I relish and enjoy time with others. I have been called "the sociable hermit." Ironically, lengthy solitude often invokes a verbal avalanche when I find myself with a dear and treasured friend, or at a rare social occasion. . . . Solitaries, I suppose, are not always introverts.

For the modern solitary, the quest for silence has vastly broader boundaries than what one's predecessors faced. Solitude is real only when it is relative to the world in which it is lived. It is unreal if attempted in fantasy--as though telephones and fax machines, the Internet and E-mail did not exist. (36)

Periods of silent solitude spent in introspective reflecting are sacred and a source of great strength and comfort. We can learn from listening to the rhythms of nature and from appreciating the eternal hush of the cosmos.

He looked down at the street, and the unbroken whiteness, and watched his foot touch the snow and listened to the slight crunching sound as he stepped forward. He looked back at his footprints. They were fascinating. He had been the only one to walk along this street today. There wasn’t even the mark of a dog or squirrel, or the scratch of a bird. He continued through the soft, silent snow, a feeling of peace starting to flow through him, helping make his step lighter and easier.

He looked at the houses he had been passing these weeks and though he had never studied them carefully they had become familiar through the process of seeing them so often, and he was now impressed with the change in their appearance as he looked at them through the gray of the air and whiteness of the snow, each house, shrub, tree, bush and mailbox trimmed with snow and blending into the air as if they were just a picture projected upon the still, pearly grayness, just an impression created by

I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.

When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.

Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.

Who says that we always have to be ready to communicate?

I see myself abandoned, solitary, thrown into a cell without dimensions, where light and shadows are silent phantoms. Within my inner self I find the silence I am seeking. But it leaves me so bereft of any memory of any human being and of me myself, that I transform this impression into the certainty of physical solitude. Were I to cry out — I can no longer see things clearly — my voice would receive the same indifferent echo from the walls of the earth.

I am always quiet so that I know what to say when I must speak.

It was either the chaos of a crowd of thoughts or the silence of solitude... nothing in between..

He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal.

The ambiance of solitude, the absence of any disturbing noise and of worldly desires and images, the quiet and calm attention of the mind to God, helped by prayer and leisurely reading, flow into that "quies" or "rest" of the soul in God. A simple and joyful rest, full of God, that leads the monk to feel, in some way, the beauty of eternal life.

Silence is fine if I am on my own but it's not overly sociable if my husband is around!

Doubt grew only in the fertile darkness of solitude

What did I fear, and why? — I, to whom the night had beena more familiar facethan that of man —I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence only a more alluring interest and charm!

The sound of darkness was certainly intricately linked to the sense of being alone but unrelated to this was the sound of the palpitations of men and women experiencing the sense of utter solitude. There was no doubt about it. This was a sound audible only on evenings such as this.

There is a sort of light surrounding Abel, something pure and strong radiates from him no matter where he is or what he's doing. Sometimes Cain thinks he possesses a soul without shadows. That's what people want to be close to. But if so, it's not like a child's, for a child's soul is delicate, its flickering flame needs no more than the opening of a door onto the world to blow it out. Nothing can destroy Abel's light. In his presence one never feels wicked, only foolish. That darkness which in

Reading well is one of the great pleasuresthat solitude can afford you, because it isat least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.

Some of us don't stay long enough in one single place, relationship, journey or country but that does not mean we evade reality or makes us unstable. It simply means, we are not very keen to entertain ourselves, for long periods of time, with the same old same old reflections or shadows on the wall, when aware of the existence of the sun; the price for enlightenment, solitude

fall in lovewith your solitude

Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it i

This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.

Machineries of reason, machineries of conduct, machineries of virtue. The machine that regulates instinct, keeps one’s hands free of another man’s throat, free of one’s own. These machines have all, as someone said, gone too long in the elements. Gummed now, rusted, bloodless.I forget who said it and I no longer care.

I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.

You’ve got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You’re only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.

..i spill intothe kind of silenceonly Khalil Gibran would understand.

I have often wished in vain,' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.''That,' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us.

Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.

He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.

Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets, visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you, when you walk in a crowd.

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.

I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

Moments spent alone make us realize the value of our own thoughts. Value your solitude.

A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.

The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.

Benj had once said, "A man must have a care to what he puts in his mind, for when he's alone on a hillside and draws it out he'll want treasures to be his company, not regrets.

To you, whoever you are, when I am gone — remember to be kind tonight to some lonely person. For me.

It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.

Solitude, a time for memories, a time to dream, a time for passions to simmer quietly in the dark recesses of the mind, eager to fly yet merely reflections in the minds eye...

Tea is just an excuse.i am drinking this sunset, this evening.and you.

Solitude 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. Jesus himself entered into this furnace. There he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant ('turn stones into loaves'), to be spectacular ('throw yourself down'), and to be powerful ('I will give you all these kingdoms'). There he affirmed God as the only source of his identity ('You must worship the Lord your God

I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude — a feeling which increases with the years.

I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men -- although the sum total of men's learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.

Friends are like sugar. When you have them, you'll feel happiness. When you have too many of them, you will suffer.

We are given these niches, small worlds of our own populated by only a handful, where we feel understood. Our bubble worlds bump into innumerable others daily, but there is so little cause to allow their integrity to be breached.

If you make friends with yourself, you'll never be alone.